childhood and alterity: experience and creation in the relationship between children and adults

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to make visible and reflect upon the lives and experience of children from the perspective of alterity, Contesting a traditional gaze that understands childhood from the perspective of lack and negativity. The researchers–a doctoral researcher and an early childhood educator– conducted the study with two groups of children aged between four and six years old, in early childhood educational spaces in two distinct and socially unequal contexts: a group of children living in a favela and a middle/upper class group. Data was produced from observing the interactions of children in play situations, and from individual and collective interviews, photographs and photo exchanges. The researchers sought, through the theoretical lenses of philosophy, sociology, and geography of childhood, to reflect on how children signify their experiences and how they announce new possibilities of relating to school culture. Play is identified as an experience that unites them as a social group, regardless of the unequal conditions in which they live, and through which it is possible to create escape routes, transcend institutional limits, exercise otherness, and produce joyful interaction. Through the ways in which they exercise their relationships with with the world through play, spaces become places and territories of childhood, expressing assigned meanings that interrogate those conventionally instituted by adults; and time is lived by children from the perspective of experience and reiteration, which confronts the chronological, linear time of rigid and standardized routines. Finally, looking at childhood from the perspective of alterity provokes us to think and produce other modes of relationship between adults and children, beyond a colonizing and tutelary perspective, as an opening and reinvention.