Uma escola da infância: cultura e espaço escolar do Núcleo de Educação Infantil - NEI-CAp/UFRN (1979-2008)

Abstract

This thesis has as object of research the culture and school space of the Núcleo de Educação Infantil (NEI-CAp/UFRN), between the years of 1979 and 2008. We used as a theoretical reference to interpret the NEI the concept of culture and school space, since teachers and children, as subjects of the educational process, were understood in their daily actions, in the relationships they established with each other, with the space and with school knowledge. The study based on these concepts allowed us to discuss both the structural invariants of the school and to answer questions about their transformations, trying to understand school practices and everyday issues, as a way of appropriating school space and time. In this sense, we work with a documentary scope consisting of documents of a bureaucratic-administrative nature, photographs, reports of pedagogical practices, narratives produced by the children and published, by the NEI, in the books of the literacy classes, as well as theses and dissertations produced by the teaching staff. of the institution. From such sources, we seek to demonstrate how the process of establishing a “different school” took place within the scope of UFRN and how, over time, the organization of a space was processed that forged a school culture based on the intertwining between the experiences and children's experiences, pedagogical mediation and historically constructed knowledge. In addition, we seek to demonstrate, on the one hand, how school culture resulting from learning and discoveries derived from research topics and, on the other hand, kinderculture and mass culture were present in children's imagination, becoming part of the experience and from the experience of the children of the NEI. We also analyzed the daily life of children's relationships and the representation, in childhood, of themes such as: family, motherhood and gender issues; children's experiences and experiences in the extracurricular space; children's sociability spaces; the “map of feelings” and the “landscapes of fear”; and, finally, the perceptions of oneself, us and others. Our work demonstrated, on the one hand, the children's role in the production of a culture and a school space and, on the other hand, the renewing character of a pedagogical proposal that, based on the active method, was able to articulate the interests and children's experience in the production of school knowledge. Such pedagogical practice made, throughout its historical trajectory, the NEI to become a paradigmatic early childhood education school in the city of Natal and in the state of Rio Grande do Norte.