Documentação pedagógica: a produção da criança protagonista e do professor designer

Abstract

This Thesis aims to problematize practices of recording child learning by teachers in Child Education, particularly the practices known as pedagogical documentation. Supported by theoretical-methodological contributions by Michel Foucault’s and his commentators, I have performed an analysis of power technologies and strategies by considering both the conduction of the conduct of the others (the government of the others) and the conduction of the conduct of oneself. By performing such analysis, the investigation has attempted to understand the way in which the practices of pedagogical documentation have functioned as a technology of government of childhood, thus producing very special ways of being a child subject in the contemporary school. By analyzing such practices, we have noticed the mobilization of other ways of teacher constitution and the emergence of other ways of being a teacher in Child Education schools. The research has used two sets of materials for analysis – 17 works that have been named as Italian references in this Thesis, which have been published in Brazil since the late 1990s; and samples of pedagogical documentation recorded by teachers in Child Education schools situated in the countryside of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The Italian references were selected because they have provided the theoretical-methodological foundation of such practices and have been used by the teacher community in Brazil due to the availability of their translations and wide publicization. From the analysis of the materials – considering the Foucauldian notion of governmentality as a grid of intelligibility –, some displacements have been noticed in the teachers’ practices of recording, which have become increasingly systematic, refined, pointillist and efficient, by capturing the details of children’s actions at school. These displacements have been related to changes in the contemporary childhood, in the childhood pedagogies, as well as in the Child Education schools, together with societal changes from an emphasis on disciplines to an emphasis on control. By analyzing the ways that these recording practices have functioned, it has been possible to defend the following thesis: the pedagogical recording practices produced by the school machine have constituted both the protagonist child and the designer teacher. They are triggered by the strategies of child interest and learning to learn, and mobilized by teaching practices of management of opportunities and teaching innovation. It is possible to conclude that the recording practices of pedagogical documentation have contributed to a certain kind of aestheticization of childhood and the production of design teaching, since they strengthen the centrality of the educational processes on the protagonist child and weaken the teacher function in teaching, thus redirecting the ways of being a teacher in Child Education.