As Relações de poder entre professoras e crianças: registros da educação infantil

Abstract

Considering the daily life of early childhood education, this research presented as a guiding question to discuss how power relations between teachers and children are established. Thus, we seek to problematize and analyze power relations using as sources the records made available by two teachers, produced in 2016, a time when both worked with children aged 2 to 4 years. Methodologically, this was a qualitative research based on documentary analysis. As for the theoretical framework, we seek an approximation with Norbert Elias' theory, for this purpose, we use the concepts of figuration, interdependence and power. Supported by this framework and treating the institution of early childhood education as a social figure, where other figures are interwoven, the sources in question have allowed us to realize that in contemporary times there is a greater equality in the balance of power between teachers and children. This perception, in our understanding, appeared from the moment when, intentionally, the teachers adapted times and spaces, making them more flexible so that the interaction between children, as well as their interaction with teachers, could take place in the best possible way. The increasing recognition of children's specificities and their potential for learning and cultural production, focuses on the expressive place of power that children occupy in collective learning spaces. In addition, they influence, alter and resignify, not only the spaces / environments of the daycare center, but also aggregate families in their daily actions, leading us to infer about relational changes, including in homes, also, from the daycare experiences. Furthermore, children demonstrated in different ways that they build their own relational webs, tensioned by their not always answered questions, gestures of empathy, alterity and very peculiar ways of recognizing the other and interacting with the world around them. Teachers, on the other hand, in spite of promoting dialogical and participatory practices, even if in many moments they do not do it intentionally, they still use artifices that seek to adjust children to models of behavior that are considered civilized, correct and acceptable.