O brincar nas produções do conhecimento da Creche UFF

O fenômeno social que se desenhou na esfera da educação infantil nos últimos anos, provocado muito pelo aumento do número de crianças em unidades educacionais, traz a emergência de repensar o fazer pedagógico e a atuação do profissional da educação infantil, buscando compreender a criança pequena como um ator social. Embora o debate sobre a finalidade da educação infantil tenha se intensificado quanto a ser sua tarefa ensinar e reproduzir o modelo de currículo por disciplinas, de outra parte, acentua-se a defesa por uma educação infantil comprometida com a brincadeira e a cultura infantil, como expresso nas atuais Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais para Educação Infantil, de 2009. Neste sentido, com a contribuição de teóricos das áreas da educação, psicologia e sociologia e a partir da análise documental de parte da produção do conhecimento produzida na Creche UFF, este trabalho busca identificar e compreender como o brincar se apresenta em 35 produções elaboradas a partir e por essa unidade de educação infantil. Para tanto, tem como metodologia a análise documental, visando a pesquisa de natureza qualitativa, à luz do paradigma interpretativo. Esta pesquisa contribui com o reconhecimento da identidade dessa unidade de educação infantil, quando articula atividade de ensino, pesquisa e extensão para alunos dos cursos de graduação e pós-graduação e professores pesquisadores e, consequentemente, contribui para o diálogo e formação dos profissionais das variadas áreas do conhecimento que se dedicam a estudos da infância. Também com propostas curriculares na perspectiva de um trabalho pedagógico com as crianças no sentido de valorizar a brincadeira como algo próprio da cultura infantil. Além disso, busca proporcionar para estudiosos um repensar a respeito da importância dessa Unidade Universitária Federal de Educação Infantil como um campo de formação profissional e produção do conhecimento sobre a infância

Vamos montar uma banda?: um olhar sobre os processos de criação musical de crianças

Esta tese possui como tema os processos de criação musical de crianças e tem como objetivo geral problematizar e compreender esses processos no contexto de uma oficina musical. Derivam-se daí questões mais específicas que consistem em saber que aspectos musicais estão envolvidos, como as crianças se relacionam e se organizam, e que sentidos as crianças atribuem a esses aspectos nos processos de criação musical. Através de uma leitura sócio-histórica, o percurso dessa pesquisa compreendeu discussões acerca da infância, da cultura e da linguagem em articulação à criação musical, que abordaram diferentes perspectivas acerca do tema. São conceitos fundamentais dessa tese o pensamento de Mikhail Bakhtin, Lev Vigotski e Walter Benjamin acerca de criação e experiência intrínsecos ao ser humano. Apresenta-se uma perspectiva crítica à infância contemporânea destacando aproximações ao universo da cultura e da música. Nesse sentido, discute-se uma concepção de música que leve em consideração os aspectos sociais articulados à produção musical, propondo-se um diálogo acerca de criação musical entre os campos da vida, da ciência e da arte. Apresentam-se como principais interlocutores dessa tese: Solange Jobim e Souza, Manoel Sarmento e Rita Pereira, sobre infância; Johan Huizinga e Gilles Brougère, sobre o lúdico; John Blacking, sobre conceito de música; e Teca de Alencar Brito, François Delalande e Lucy Green, sobre crianças, música e educação musical. O trabalho de campo teve como objetivo realizar composições numa oficina musical, sob o formato de uma banda de música popular, realizada numa escola pública federal da cidade do Rio de Janeiro, com um grupo de crianças entre nove e onze anos. Para interlocução com as crianças, adotou-se como suporte teórico e metodológico a perspectiva sobre alteridade e dialogismo de Mikhail Bakhtin, assim como a perspectiva de uma pesquisa-intervenção e de uma pesquisa como experiência estética. Como achados da pesquisa, observa-se que os processos de criação dessas crianças na oficina são negociados entre pares, obedece a condições próprias para seu desenvolvimento e se dão entrelaçados às suas experiências musicais revelando laços da criança com aspectos da cultura. Destacam-se nesse processo também uma integração entre as atividades de criar, aprender, reproduzir e as motivações que dão conta disso e que sugerem uma singular relação com a cultura contemporânea. Ressalta-se a importância da atividade de criação musical como lugar de compartilhamento de significados e sentidos

O brinquedo na educação infantil como promotor das culturas da infância e humanização

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Memória, infância e brincar em escritos de Walter Benjamin: cultura lúdica e processos de formação e prática docente

This text aims to present some ideas of the philosopher Walter Benjamin, one of the most intriguing intellectuals of our time, trying to outline in his work the relationship that the author establishes between childhood playing and ludic culture, more precisely regarding the memory of playing, childhood, culture, history and memory in contemporary society after the twentieth century. Thus, in order to identify reinterpreted experiments, as places, forms of playing and types of toys made out of this paradigm, we were guided by the notes, essays, translations and articles in which Benjamin identified conceptions of childhood and ludic culture. Benjamin's view of childhood is not childish, simplistic or reductive. His works allow us to discuss and justify the need for a more detailed analysis on the phenomenon of development and teaching practice within the everyday schoolchildren. By revisiting the original ideas, and irreverent criticism of Benjamin, thinking education from his account, we hope to contribute with other studies in the field of education, by elucidating the process of development and teaching practice in relation to the ludic childhood culture, specifically regarding childhood and the places of childhood in the contemporary context.

Rethinking Culture and Diversity in Early Childhood Preservice Teacher Education: Looking at Teaching and Learning Through an Interdisciplinary Lens

Early Childhood Education (ECE) has a long history of building foundations for children to achieve their full potential, enabling parents to participate in the economy while children are cared for, addressing poverty and disadvantage, and building individual, community and societal resources. In so doing, ECE has developed a set of cultural practices and ways of knowing that shape the field and the people who work within it. ECE, consequently, is frequently described as unique and special (Moss, 2006; Penn, 2011). This works to define and distinguish the field while, simultaneously, insulating it from other contexts, professions, and ideas. Recognising this dualism illuminates some of the risks and challenges of operating in an insular and isolated fashion. In the 21st century, there are new challenges for children, families and societies to which ECE must respond if it is to continue to be relevant. One major issue is how ECE contributes to transition towards more sustainable ways of living. Addressing this contemporary social problem is one from which Early Childhood teacher education has been largely absent (Davis & Elliott, 2014), despite the well recognised but often ignored role of education in contributing to sustainability. Because of its complexity, sustainability is sometimes referred to as a ‘wicked problem’ (Rittel & Webber, 1973; Australian Public Service Commission, 2007) requiring alternatives to ‘business as usual’ problem solving approaches. In this chapter, we propose that addressing such problems alongside disciplines other than Education enables the Early Childhood profession to have its eyes opened to new ways of thinking about our work, potentially liberating us from the limitations of our “unique” and idiosyncratic professional cultures. In our chapter, we focus on understandings of culture and diversity, looking to broaden these by exploring the different ‘cultures’ of the specialist fields of ECE and Design (in this project, we worked with students studying Architecture, Industrial Design, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design). We define culture not as it is typically represented, i.e. in relation to ideas and customs of particular ethnic and language groups, but to the ideas and practices of people working in different disciplines and professions. We assert that different specialisms have their own ‘cultural’ practices. Further, we propose that this kind of theoretical work helps us to reconsider ways in which ECE might be reframed and broadened to meet new challenges such as sustainability and as yet unknown future challenges and possibilities. We explore these matters by turning to preservice Early Childhood teacher education (in Australia) as a context in which traditional views of culture and diversity might be reconstructed. We are looking to push our specialist knowledge boundaries and to extend both preservice teachers and academics beyond their comfort zones by engaging in innovative interdisciplinary learning and teaching. We describe a case study of preservice Early Childhood teachers and designers working in collaborative teams, intersecting with a ‘real-world’ business partner. The joint learning task was the design of an early learning centre based on sustainable design principles and in which early Education for Sustainability (EfS) would be embedded Data were collected via focus group and individual interviews with students in ECE and Design. Our findings suggest that interdisciplinary teaching and learning holds considerable potential in dismantling taken-for-granted cultural practices, such that professional roles and identities might be reimagined and reconfigured. We conclude the chapter with provocations challenging the ways in which culture and diversity in the field of ECE might be reconsidered within teacher education.

Childhood and social interaction in everyday life : an epilogue

The epilogue pulls together the conceptual and methodological significance of the papers in the special issue exploring childhood and social interaction in everyday life in Sweden, Norway, United States and Australia. In considering the special issue, four domains of childhood are identified and discussed: childhood is a social construct where children learn how to enter into and participate in their social organizations, competency is best understood when communicative practices are examined in situ, children’s talk and interaction show situated culture in action, and childhood consists of shared social orders between children and adults. Emerging analytic interests are proposed, including investigating how children understand locations and place. Finally, the epilogue highlights the core focus of this special issue, which is showing children’s own methods for making sense of their everyday contexts using the interactional and cultural resources they have to hand.

Children, childhood and the contemporary media

This chapter investigates and critiques the idea of the sexualization of children in the contemporary media with a focus on recent events in Australia. It begins by commenting about aspects of Corporate Paedophilia: Sexualisation of children in Australia (Rush & La Nauze, 2006a) and then investigates relevant literature about consuming bodies to provide a frame for discussing consumer culture, children and childhood. Following this, the sexualization of children in the contemporary media is explored from the perspective of moral panics and the discourses of neoliberal tolerance and intolerance. The chapter concludes that although the idea of children being sexualized in contemporary media is contested, there can be no simple explanations and that a multiplicity of factors need to be taken into account that exist outside of media discourses.

Reflections on talk about natural disasters by early childhood educators and directors

Facilitated discussion with early childhood staff working with children and families affected by natural disasters in Queensland, Australia, raises issues regarding educational communication in emergencies. This paper reports on these discussions as ‘reflections on talk’. It examines discrepancies between the literature and staff talk, gaps in the literature, and the inaccessible style of some literature-demanded collaborative debate and information re-interpretation. Reframing of the discourse style was used to support staff de-briefing, mutual encouragement, and sharing of insights on promoting resilience in children and families. Formal investigation is required regarding effective emergency-situation talk between staff, as well as with children and families.

Intercultural Dialogues in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability : Embedding Indigenous Perspectives

Embedding Indigenous perspectives in early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS) upholds social and political action goals that support a holistic approach to promoting sustainability in educational contexts. Such goals should be responsive to particular contexts and their histories to ensure local issues are a focus of sustainability alongside global areas of concern. This chapter explores how intercultural dialogues and priorities foreground broader themes of sustainability that attend to local issues around culture and diversity, and equity in relations between groups of people. Attending to such themes in educational practice unsettles a standard environmental narrative and broadens the scope and potential for ECEfS in early years settings. Strengthening intercultural priorities in ECEfS requires a commitment to reflective practices that attend to the influence of one's cultural background on teaching and learning processes. Educators committed to reflective practices provide even greater capacity for children to act as change agents (Davis, 2008, 2010) around multiple dimensions of sustainability.

Literacy and Digital Culture in the Early Years

In this chapter we present data drawn from observations of kindergarten children using iPads and talk with the children, their parents/guardians and teachers. We identify a continuum of practices that extends from ‘educational apps’ teaching handwriting, sight words and so forth to uses of the iPad as a device for multimodal literacy development and substantive conversation around children’s creative work. At the current time high stakes testing and the implementation of the Australian Curriculum are prompting new public and professional conversations about literacy and digital technology. The iPad is construed as both cause of and solution to problems of traditional literacy education. In this context we describe the literacies enabled by educational software available on iPads. We higlight the time constraints which bore on teachers' capacity to enact their visions of literacy education through the iPad platform and suggest ways of reflecting on responses to this constraint.

Forward: Which childhood? Whose deficit?

A commentary on Whiteness studies, linguistic and cultural minority and Indigenous studies in early childhood language and literacy socialization. When the literature on ‘Whiteness’ first emerged in the 1990s, I was offended and skeptical. As an Asian who has lived in White-dominant cultures most of my life, my reflex was to say something like: “Yeah – they want to be ‘special’ too. After all our struggles to get beyond an unmarked place of deficit in the fields of disciplinary knowledge and social sciences – now they want ‘Whiteness’ as their own ethnic studies”...

Early Childhood teachers’ work in a time of change

This article investigates teacher decision-making in a time of rapid educational reforms. Institutional ethnography is used to discover how teachers’ work is co-ordinated by the texts of a new national curriculum, and a system for the assessment and ratings of kindergarten, preschool and long day-care services in individual settings and across sites. The research draws on video recorded interview data gathered from five teachers working with three to five year old children in kindergarten classrooms throughout South East Queensland. Analysis shows the reported effects of policy regimes designed to improve the quality of learning young children experience, on classroom teachers’ work. Findings suggest that increasing levels of governance enacted through policy texts are creating an audit culture where teachers’ educational work with children is changing. The article argues that the reported workload associated with the production of evidence, and the focus on providing ‘proof’ of quality, is taking teachers away from time spent building educative relationships with children. Note: In Queensland, kindergarten caters for children aged three and a half to five years. This year is known as Preschool in some Australian states.

Edmund Burke and the heritage of oral culture

The dissertation proposes that one of the more fruitful ways of interpreting Burke's work is to evaluate him as an oral performer rather than a literary practitioner and it argues that in his voice can be heard the modulations of the genres and conventions of oral composition of eighteenth-century Gaelic Ireland. The first chapter situates Burke in the milieu of the Gaelic landed class of eighteenth-century Ireland. The next chapter examines how the rich oral culture of the Munster Gaelic gentry, where Burke spent his childhood days, was to provide a lasting influence on the form and content of Burke's work. His speeches on the British constitution are read in the context of the historical and literary culture of the Jacobites, specifically the speculum principis, Párliament na mBán. The third chapter surveys the tradition of Anglo-Irish theoretical writings on oratory and discusses how Burke is aligned with this school. The focus is on how Burke's thought and practice, his 'idioms', might be understood as being mediated through the criterion of orality rather than literature. The remaining chapters discuss Burke's politics and performance in the light of Gaelic cultural practices such as the rituals of the courts of poetry, the Warrant Poems or Barántas; the performance of funeral laments and elegies, Caoineadh, the laments for the fallen nobility, Marbhna na daoine uaisle, the satires and the political vision allegories of Munster, Aislingí na Mumhan; to show how they provide us with a remarkable context for discussing Burke's poetical-political performance. In hearing Burke's voice through the body of Gaelic culture our understanding of Burke's position in the wider world of the eighteenth century (and hence his meaning) is profoundly affected.

People believe it is plausible to have forgotten memories of childhood sexual abuse.

Pezdek, Blandon-Gitlin, and Gabbay (2006) found that perceptions of the plausibility of events increase the likelihood that imagination may induce false memories of those events. Using a survey conducted by Gallup, we asked a large sample of the general population how plausible it would be for a person with longstanding emotional problems and a need for psychotherapy to be a victim of childhood sexual abuse, even though the person could not remember the abuse. Only 18% indicated that it was implausible or very implausible, whereas 67% indicated that such an occurrence was either plausible or very plausible. Combined with Pezdek et al.s' findings, and counter to their conclusions, our findings imply that there is a substantial danger of inducing false memories of childhood sexual abuse through imagination in psychotherapy.