Isso é participação? Isso é boneco mandado : o prescritivo, o contractual e a participação das crianças na cena escolar

Abstract

This research is part of the biggest Project called The construction of social knowledge by children: a study about child experience and meanings (2016-2020), of the Research Group in Childhood Psychology. It is an investigative exercise (2015-2019) comprehended by the articulation between the Social Representations Theory, the Historic-Cultural Theory about the processes of child development, the ontological assumptions about the contemporary educational crisis and, above all, the educative actions toward children. It aims to comprehend − to feel, to listen to and to interpret − children and their rights to participate in the educative institution: the school; also to understand the representation that they have about themselves, about other children and about the world.By the means of a qualitative approach, it begins by the assumption that affirms that children are social agents and their actions create social realities in a dynamics that acknowledge their civic, political and social visibility. The exercise of generating the data was realized in a public school in Cuiabá - MT, in a class of children that had from seven to eight years old and a group of 12 teachers. From the proposed point, we sought to understand the implications of agency processes, whose meanings children share and negotiate − which, in turn, are anchored in the different paradigms of education and objectified by the educational practices undertaken by an educational community. The methodology was inspired in the ethnographic approach and organized in three stages: 1. Documentary analysis of the school‘s Political Pedagogic Project (PPP); 2. Participating observation with the scholar groupengaging children in their relationship with the teacher; 3. Semistructured interview with the teacher‘s group. For the analysis and processing of the information, specific techniques were employed for each stage of data production, comprehending, in a general way, the comprehensive analysis and the analysis from the proposal of nucleus of signification. Regarding the documentary analysis, we can observe a perspective of education that has been built around contemporary conceptions of teaching, based on interdisciplinary reflections that cross the field of Pedagogy of Participation, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology and Art announcing a political and theoretical school choice. The second stage of the data analysis reveal that the verb to participate seems to be combined in a diffuse way in the classroom. In this context, to participate includes the teacher‘s attitude that authorizes or denies this participation. However, the third level of analysis presented a process of construction in the discourse of a group of teachers about the child's participation in the classroom, and even in the school setting, they announce two networks of different meanings, namely: the first refers to the school as a learning space in a content-oriented perspective with a focus on the product; the second refers to the school as a learning space in the dialogical perspective focused on the process. Of these two meanings derive the elaboration of pedagogical practices that guide structures of opportunities for learning and development. The observation of such opportunities structures indicates the existence of different levels of children's participation in the school scene, both in the prescriptive dimension and in the contractual dimension. They are: participation of the imperative obligation type; engaged participation; spontaneous, reflexive and dialogic participation and self-initiated participation maintained by children.