“É tudo pra ontem!”: Escolarização de crianças venezuelanas na Educação Infantil em Uberlândia-MG e o papel da afetividade

Abstract

The present research aimed to understand how the schooling of a Venezuelan child living in Brazil takes place, as well as to investigate how language and affectivity are constituted in this process. Brazil has become one of the main destinations for Venezuelan immigrants and refugees. Even though there is legislation that serves this audience, language constitutes an obstacle to guaranteeing rights. School dropout among Venezuelan students is higher than among Brazilians and, one of the reasons, would be the low number of teachers who speak Spanish. Therefore, language also constitutes a challenge for schooling. We seek to understand how affectivity can be important for inclusion and for new possible forms of communication to be collectively thought of. We carried out participant observation over a period of four months in an Early Childhood Education class in the city of Uberlândia-MG and individual and semi-structured interviews with the professionals who worked in the class. The analysis was based on the Cores of Meaning, under the perspective of the Historical-Cultural Psychology approach. We noted the importance of affection in the process of appropriating school space and for learning itself. The scenes mediated by affectivity showed new forms of communication that transcend verbal communication. We understand that affectivity can and should be used to create collective learning. In the interviews, we observed that the professionals feel lonely and helpless when it comes to working with immigrant children. For them, their initial and continued training did not help them deal with this new context. Therefore, there is an urgent need to create public policies that actually ensure the inclusion of immigrant children and that guarantee support to education professionals in the face of this growing population in our country.