Movimento corporal da criança na educação infantil: expressão, comunicação e interação

Abstract

This study discusses the movement of children s bodies in children s education, an essential way of expressing, communicating and interacting. With it, we aim at understanding the movement, or else, the body expression of five- and six-year-old children within the space of an institute for children s education located in the periphery of the city of Uberlândia (Minas Gerais, Brazil). With such purpose defined, we searched for a methodology likely to make us learn the body movement of children without breaking or limiting the movement itself, or its dynamics, or the expression of life in the space of the institution being researched. We found trails in the qualitative research that led us to build knowledge in how to interact with the subjects of the research. Following such trails we noticed that the observation was our greatest ally in our research, because we were dealing with infant subjects and because we had in their body movement the main objective of our study. We remained five months in the mentioned institute, not more than three days per week, which added up to 193 (one hundred and ninety-three) hours of observation. We used our field notes which registered the observations held in the institute and interviewed the class teachers as well as the institute s Pedagogical Coordinator. We also made use of pictures in a way to register the children s body movement. Our analyses point to the perception that the body movement is seen as lack of attention ; therefore, it is normally discouraged. As the body movement is not acknowledged by the professionals as an important element for the children s development, it is not as well given the proper focus of attention either at the moment of organizing space and routine or when the teachers themselves plan their performance. However, the dialogues developed made us realize the distance between the discourse and the praxis. In fact, this not merely means that the teachers orally express a theory while assuming a new posture at practice. Those teachers, indeed, put in practice what they interpret from the theories, including the one about the children s development. So, the formation of teachers surely cannot be taken for granted in our final analyses, for it is one of the essential elements for carrying out a practice which is attentive enough to the importance of children s body movement as a means of expressing, communicating and interacting with their peers in the school environment.