CONCERNS IN CHILDHOOD EDUCATION: A JOURNEY FROM THE VALUATION OF CULTURES OF CHILDHOOD.

Abstract

Childhood Education Professionals live a context of caring and have made efforts to analyze and collaborate on improving the quality of Childhood Education in the Brazilian reality. This research project, funded by the Center Program for Teaching of UNESP, also assumes the goal of advancing the quality of Childhood Education and it is the result of a partnership between the FCT/UNESP of Presidente Prudente and a City Department of Education of President Prudente Region, SP. It is supported by the Historical and Cultural Theory and Sociology of Childhood, which despite their differences, consider child as protagonist in the teaching-learning procedure and culture producer. Still, both value interpersonal relationships, imagination and playful activities as essential to the psychological makeup and personality of the child. However, it turns out that the reality is that educational practices do not consider these assumptions and the child ends up suffering the consequences of this discrepancy between theory and practice. Due to this complex task of reality transformation, the methodology that guides the research is action-research. In this perspective, we seek to involve teachers of Childhood Education, in all dimensions: the definition of the problem, the theoretical expertise, in data collection and results evaluation. Periodically, the participants from both the university and partner institutions, carry out joint interventions with the children and participate in seminars, seeking to achieve the objectives of the investigation. The results show the difficulty in advancing in educational reality, considering the prevalence of spontaneist, traditional and technicism conceptions of education. However, when there is membership of the teacher and he assumes the role of mediator, children gradually overcome their fears and begin to compose another formation context supported in their cultures and this change reflects positively on the autonomy and on the process of formation and child development.