| dc.description.abstract | In a context of institutionalization of the right to play in Early Childhood Education, what are
the relationships and principles that enable the constitution of play as an activity for infants and
children? What generates the social need to play in a group that shares the collective context of
care and education? What dialectical transformations happen in the cultural development of
infants, in spaces/times, in social relations and in play? From the study on the processes of
constitution of play in a group of infants over a two-year period in Early Childhood Education
(2017-2018), we argue that it is the need for participating in the group that mobilizes intentions,
actions, mastery and appropriation of social practices, languages and the shared activity that
allows for the emergence of play. The social events that affect the lives of infants and children,
inside and outside the school, circumscribe the cultural content of the imaginary situations
created in the interactions with peers, teachers, support professionals and cultural artifacts. The
historicity of these cultural contents of play — space, time, collective cultural routines and care
routines — supports the arguments for the thesis that the play of infants and children is an act
of creating possibilities of participation in the social group and of creating meanings for the
events of collective life; an act constituted by the unity [action/imagination], which expands the
capability to act, communicate, relate, affect, be affected and share intentions, symbols and
meanings with Others. The field research was carried out at a Municipal School of Early
Childhood Education in Belo Horizonte (EMEI Tupi) — Minas Gerais, Brazil — based on the
ontological and epistemological foundations of Historical-Cultural Theory and Ethnography in
Education, as well as on dialogues with Infant and Child Studies. The epistemology for
understanding the production of the existence of infants in collective contexts and the
constitution of singularities is based on the ontology of infants as potente and vulnerable social
beings who, in their relationships with Others and with materialities, produce subjectivities,
individualities and human singularity. Therefore, understanding the constitution of play
discloses the political and social status of collective care and education practices. All the
empirical material was generated through observations of the group’s daily life, registered with
video recording resources, photographs and a field diary, through a logic of dialectic-abductive
research. The processes of constituting singing games and role-playing mother and daughter in
the group’s trajectory show their cultural genesis, their concreteness in collective social
practices and in relationships of otherness built through the sharing of narrative and symbolic
sources, cultural and care routines at EMEI Tupi. The analyses allow us to affirm that there is
the creation of imaginary situations through the languages in use and, in these situations, there
is the creation of expressiveness, communicability, repercussions, surprises, uses of objects as
representative gestures that are keys of the symbolic function, of a social system of speech in
which one has what, where and to whom to speak. The visual symbols created are experienced
in [action/imagination] in a particular way and become part of the group, which makes it
possible to institute emerging alterity and collectivity. This creative principle of an exercise in
the humanization of the world by infants and children has ethical, aesthetic and political
meanings for Pedagogies aligned with the defense of the right to play and the production of
subjectivities, and a resistance movement in the face of the standardization processes since
Early Childhood Education. | |
