Material culture as a methodological possibility for studies on the history of early childhood education in Brazil

Abstract

Early Childhood Education in Brazil is now legitimized by the Federal Constitution (BRASIL, 1988) when the Magna Carta discusses the right of children to education, as well as attentive to the duty of the State and the family to comply with this right. To the Law of Guidelines and Bases (BRASIL, 1996), once again Early Childhood Education gains the spotlight when it is defended as the first stage of Basic Education. The 1990s, with those and new achievements, were demarcated with and by the publication of different documents: advisors, curricular, and legislatures. No rights were won without the need for the movement of several groups of society (TELES, 2018). However, one of the most evident movements was that of scholars and researchers in the area of Early Childhood Education who defended/advocated the break with educational care practices and preparation for elementary school, and who discussed the historical dichotomy between daycare centers and kindergartens. With the defense of the dissociability of education and care, it began to understand that Early Childhood Education is a place of care and education and that it aimed/aims at the integral development of children from zero to five years and 11 months, complementing the action of the family and the community (LDB, 1996), being also a place between children's knowledge and knowledge historically constructed by humanity. In this wake, when proposing such a breakup, questions were raised about the ways of organizing curricula for Early Childhood Education, based on a curriculum that holds as centrality the children, their social markers, and their multiple ways of living childhood. These curricula also set the scene for play, social interactions, and languages as axes that structure pedagogical proposals in Early Childhood Education (BRASIL, 2009). To achieve their objectives, the pedagogical proposals of early childhood education institutions must provide conditions for collective work and the organization of materials, spaces, and times In line with the narratives put here, the materialities, which were and are in circulation in the educational units (PERES and SILVA, 2011) enabled/enabled possibilities of representations (CHARTIER, 1991, 1992) on the history of Early Childhood Education in Brazil, through the struggles of representations throughout history. These materialities are capable of being sources and objects of research, from the defenses of cultural history (BURKE, 1991; PESAVENTO, 2003), who maintain that there is a much wider range of sources and objects, moving from the idea that only large "events" would be research objects. It is defended in this summary, that the possibility of taking school culture as a historical object (JULIA, 2001), allowed to outline the circulation, in educational institutions, of material elements (VIÑAO FRAGO, 2008), expanding the circumscription of which there is a school material culture. By marking curricula, objectives, and specific practices for Early Childhood Education, attention is made to the existence of material culture of/for Early Childhood Education, since the break with the school and the schooling conceptions grant us to delimit the material culture that "echoes" aspects of Early Childhood Education, whether analyzed through architecture, toys, of objects, utensils, or even elements of nature.