“A gente tá fazendo um feitiço”: cultura de pares e experiência estética no ateliê de artes plásticas em contexto de educação infantil

Abstract

This paper aims to reflect on the role of social interactions between children in the process of building artistic productions in playful and imaginative dynamics, understood as an integral part of the peer culture in settings of art studios in preschools. It seeks to understand the role of children’s peer interactions in the expression of their plastic languages, at the time children create them in a shared manner, assuming that socialization and children’s cultures are situated phenomena, i.e., they “happen” in social, historical, and culturally determined contexts. The research is based on the psychoethological perspective of Ana Maria Almeida Carvalho and Maria Isabel Pedrosa, on children’s sociology of William Corsaro and on concepts about the imagination of Tania Zittoun and FrédéricCerchia. My thesis is that the visual productions of children, understood as a constituent part of children’s culture, are urged constructions in social peer-to-peer interactions, as they propitiate signification processes riddled with imagination in a teaching space adequate to the needs of children, i.e., processes circumscribed by the notion that children are agents of their own development, creations, appropriations and cultural transmission. The interpretative field research, was conducted in a public municipal preschool of Maceió, Alagoas, with eleven 4- to 5-year-old children. One of the school classrooms, used as a reading and video room, was reorganized for the purpose of this research with the introduction of a space for an art studio, with furniture and materials needed for children’s production of drawings, collage, paintings, modeling, and construction. Twelve 45-minute long sessions were held in the format of art class, twice a week, between July and October 2016, where children worked in the shared production of visual objects, in two phases. The first, a familiarization phase of the art studio in which the group was divided into two subgroups, and a final phase, in which all children were brought together. In all sessions, children’s actions and conversations of were videotaped and the visual productions were photographed. After examining the sessions, a few episodes, whose narratives describe the actions, gestures, looks, facial expressions and words, were selected to be fully transcribed. These transcriptions were the basis for a microanalysis of the interactions between the various actors in the context of the art studio for children with their specific materials. The analysis showed that the meanings constructed by children are affected by space and materials’ specific arrangement, indicating the importance of the context for symbolic exchanges and for the construction of peer culture, inciting the imagination in sharing processes that constitute a visual peer culture.