daydream on a childhood with the clay

Abstract

The essay addresses a writing experience constituted during a research project inspired by the relationship between education, childhood and Gaston Bachelard’s poetic imagination phenomenology. From the bachelardian suggestion of replacing in face of the world the perception with admiration, to retain the values of what is perceived, emerges a writing dyed both by the encounters of babies, small children and teachers and by the rêveries of the first author from photographic records of children’s play with clay. In order to describe and think the complexity of the rêveries possibles from a childhood experience, we opted for the bachelardian phenomenology of poetic imagination. To assume the admiration as a possibility to surpass the perceived, as a way to reencounter and extend - through imagination - the forces that are in the world, it’s to transgress a writing that explains and verifies to highlight the movement between dreaming and thinking provoked by the values of a childhood that animate reserves of enthusiasm that invite us to inhabit and to take part in the world with another words.