Brincar é coisa de criança? Um retrato da produção acadêmica brasileira sobre o brincar

Abstract

The present research aimed to investigate and discuss how the playing theme is portrayed in the Brazilian academic production, in a bibliographic research. Playing is seen as a complex subject and is constituted as an interdisciplinary object of study. Therefore, it is aimed: to conduct a bibliographic research on the studies about playing, characterizing them; identify the theoretical approaches adopted in the studies; characterize how the academic production in Psychology has been approaching the concept of playing, discussing its implications; analyze and discuss the concepts of playing that are present in the investigated productions based on the theory of playing proposed by Donald Winnicott. A bibliographic study was made on the playing theme using periodicals found in Scielo Brasil database. Aiming to contemplate a large number of productions on playing, it was used, separately, six describers or keywords: playing, play, toy, game, ludic and playful. The period used for the selection of the articles was from 2007 to 2011. The selection of the articles followed a bibliographical research technique named reading stage. In the first stage of reading the material, it was found 478 articles, representing the total of existing publications in the database platform that are related to the used keywords. The next stages consisted in exploratory and selective reading, followed by critical or reflexive reading, which lead to a reduction of the number of the articles, totalizing 184 articles. To each article it was build a chart containing a reading script including identifying information of the article, as such: title; authors; year of publication; name of the magazine and its field; type of research, if qualitative or quantitative; nature of the research, if empirical or theoretical; theoretical approach; methodology; characteristics of the studied population, such as age and sociological and cultural context; where the research took place; the playing concept; and initial impressions of the researcher. Thus, a quantification of the articles was made based on the emerging results from these elements. The results of this stage evidence that the importance of playing for the childhood development is unquestionable, although some arguments are based in different theoretical approaches and are variable. Psychology is highlighted as a scientific field which is concerned with playing as a study object itself. The qualitative researches are more frequent in the studies on playing that were investigated. For the last stage of the reading, interpretative reading, the articles linked to Psychology that had playing itself as their study object were selected. In this stage it was selected 22 articles that presented some definition of playing. The analysis method for the material was based in the content analysis, creating categories of analysis of the investigated material. It was noticed that conceptualizing playing consigns two configurations: one that is more concerned with the definition itself e another one more based on the functionality of playing. Playing appears strongly associated with the child's experience, although a single article points to the possibility of addressing this issue beyond childhood. In many articles, playing is discussed and used as a tool to collect data, which already points to a conception of playing as a natural activity in childhood. During the systematization of the concepts found, it was sought an approximation with the concept of playing proposed by Winnicott. The great contribution and differentiation of Winnicott in reading the data was his conception of playing as a constitutive element of the development and capacity of the individual to exist.