Drawings of children: Reading the world

Abstract

In this article, we do an exercise in understanding how Childhood Education students make their readings of the world and create meanings to it through the Class Book of Stories, a pedagogical activity developed at Unidade Municipal de Educação Infantil Rosalina de Araújo Costa, a school located in Niterói (Rio de Janeiro), since the year of 2005. We dialogue with the cultural-historical perspective and with sociology of childhood, focusing on children's drawings. We realize that, as one of the elements of childhood cultures, drawings are permeated by world views, by desires and expectations, and may be effectively considered as language. These drawings are the result of an intense process of driving back and forth between imagination and reality. This means that early childhood education should be a space for different experiences, exchange among subjects, for contact with different artistic manifestations and for varied everyday experience understood as real research exercises. In this context, it is possible to think of children’s drawings as deconstruction, creation and even subversion. In order to contribute to more meaningful pedagogical practices in Early Childhood Education, it is necessary that teachers have a different view, beyond mere contemplation, beyond fixing labels or framing children into pre-established categories.