Ser-Professora-Brincante: O entrelaçar do brincar no desenvolvimento profissional docente na educação infantil

Abstract

This thesis is built on the (inter)links between Play, Early Childhood Education and Professional Teacher Development (DPD). The choice of this research path is linked to three intertwining aspects: my personal roots, childhood memories and professional trajectory. To reach the (un)limits of concerns, I start from the following question: How does play reveal itself, in Professional Teacher Development, and reflect ways of being a teacher in Early Childhood Education, at different stages of the career? I seek, therefore, to analyze how play reveals itself in Professional Teacher Development and reflects ways of Being a Teacher in Early Childhood Education. In the weaving of this path, the investigation was developed based on two specific objectives: to understand the ways in which teachers perceive and experience play in their pedagogical practice; to analyze how the reflections of play contribute to the construction of ways of Being a Teacher in Early Childhood Education. Between routes and scripts, this is a phenomenological research, since it seeks to understand the phenomenon with the purpose of socializing knowledge. The approach is qualitative and exploratory in terms of its objective. The chosen locus was a public daycare center located in Rio Real, Bahia. The participants were three Early Childhood Education teachers, responsible for classes of children aged 0 to 5 years, whose experiences and pedagogical practices were central to the construction of this study. The approaches were woven through the following devices: Questionnaire; Notebook of Playful Memories and Narrative Interview. The comprehensive interpretative analysis anchored the treatment of the corpus of this investigation. The narratives allowed the emergence of meanings and characteristics that evidenced the ways of seeing and experiencing play in their pedagogical practices, associating themselves with the repertoire of games transmitted throughout life, with playing in childhood and with the challenges of adult perception of play. Furthermore, we could summarize that reviving the playfulness of each teacher is a challenge to be faced, when we understand that this is a specificity of this profession and must be present from the beginning to the end of their career. The narratives provide us with answers to the objective set, by revealing that one of the main factors that reflect their ways of playing in teaching is found in the experiences in their personal lives, mainly in childhood. However, they also reveal that other factors influence their playful practices, such as being a mother, or having participated in a course or training, and also reveal the need for dialogue, exchange and support from the educational system, from the institution where they work to training actions that address the specificities of teaching at this level of education. The research also mobilized reflections on (re)learning to play in adulthood, re-equipping the way of Being a Teacher in Early Childhood Education, in search of Being-A-Playful-Teacher. Public policies are therefore required to guarantee training that takes into account the specificities of this profession. The argument of this thesis maintains that, in order to be a teacher in early childhood education, one must be a playful teacher. To this end, it is essential that training courses (initial and continuing) integrate play as a professional knowledge. In the interweaving of voices, theories and practices, it is concluded that being a playful teacher is a journey and not a point of arrival. This condition requires the courage of the researcher and the teachers to unsettle certainties, drawing threads between past and present, theory and practice, play and teaching.