A criança em movimento: reflexões sobre trabalho, educação e o brincar do campo ao morro

Abstract

This thesis aims to understand the meanings of being a child in urban and rural contexts of poverty. Thus, we performed an action research where the main data collection instruments were a field notes and the development of a children's book. We visited three schools from different social realities within the context of social inequality: a school on the fields, a traveling school in the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST in portuguese), and a school located in a slum area. Our theoretical and methodological reflections and data analysis were guided by Marxist assumptions and socio-historical psychology. Whereas children live their universe in particular, our results reveals that, while these three distinct ways of experiencing childhood resemble, they also distance from each other. In the field, children show the astonishment with the imminence of work, contradictory relations with the city, and warn us about the man-nature relationship. Children from the MST school, otherwise, show us another logic of human relationships that break down with the capitalist model, combining work and education dimensions; even collectively, each child is unique and, since they are immersed in the dynamics of the social movement from an early age, they learn to question, decide, and claim their rights. On the slum area, children acknowledge the presence of drug traffic, the appeal to consumption, and the sexualization of childhood. In common, these children have the playing, whose meaning is experienced differently in each context. In our discussions, we seek to build a reflection on the amount of work, education and playing from the field to the favelas; we discuss capitalist determinations about a contemporary childhood and weave critics to psychological science that has exploited, through history, different concepts of child development - most of them guided by naturalizing visions that underlie practices against social transformation and human emancipation, especially the creation, which exploits the child s play