Lifeworlds narrated by young children in childhood schools in the Distrito Federal
Childhood. Narratives. Aesthetic Education. Research with children. Covid-19.
The childhood school is a privileged space for the dissemination of knowledge and literary practices, providing the aesthetic experience of children and adults. As a basic education teacher for 26 years, and a researcher with young children and their oral narratives, some concerns arose: what would be the themes present in the daily narratives of young children in educational institutions? How would the aesthetic experiences experienced by young children occur in literary practices in educational institutions? Added to these questions that accompanied me previously, I also questioned: how would these processes take place in a pandemic context? In the quest to answer these questions, I develop this thesis, which has as its central objective to understand the lifeworlds of young children through their own narratives in educational institutions in the Distrito Federal. This objective resulted in the following specific objectives: to analyze how young children express their social contexts in everyday narrative situations, reading mediation and storytelling in educational institutions; to analyze the narrative performances of children based on the aesthetic experiences they have lived and to analyze symbolic productions of young children present at kindergarten in a pandemic context. The empirical research was carried out with four classes of the 2nd period composed of children aged between 5 and 6 years in four public school units of Early Childhood Education located in peripheral regions of the Distrito Federal: Cidade Estrutural, Planaltina, Recanto das Emas and Riacho Fundo 2 during the 2021 school year, outlined in a performative ethnographic approach through artistic-pedagogical practices of reading mediation and storytelling in a virtual and face-to-face context, with the following instruments: participant observation, conversational dynamics, story workshops, workshops of ludic activities and written, pictorial and audiovisual records of the narrative production of young children. I produced with the collaborating children the book Children Narrators, with 57 narrative performances by young children, which were categorized according to the themes addressed: stories of death, family stories, stories of non-humans, stories of enchanted beings, stories of poverty, stories of heroes and heroines and stories of hurt. I argue that the narratives of young children show their worlds of life as a performative practice in childhood school, based on the materiality of the narrative performances of young children and the reports of episodes experienced in the empirical journey in dialogue with the authors and guest authors for this conversation about childhoods, narratives and pandemic everyday life.