The body in social practices of care among children, implications in daily education: playing to care for another and being cared for by another

Abstract

In their play, children explore social practices of care, as we have observed in our trajectories as researchers committed to the new early childhood studies. Using ethnography, and an interpretive approach, understanding this as a methodology that identifies a possible path towards the concretization of an “experience of proximity” (Geertz, 1989) to young children, we encounter recurring situations in which the body is central to this play. This mobilizes us to analyze how children experience routines of caring for others and being cared for by others. This article highlights routines inherent to children’s play, in their repeated, but always renovated interactions, appropriations and transformations, proposed and experienced collectively and singularly, to reflect on their implications for educational practices in the daily activity of institutions, recognizing that the body, in relations of care in educational institutions (whether for Early Childhood, or other Institutional Care) is traditionally considered through perspectives and actions of professional adults. We thus propose to construct “other pedagogies of bodies” that recognize the corporal human totality, beginning with the education of babies, denying all and any process of decorporalization that still marks cognitivist, content-focused pedagogy, which promotes pedagogical concepts that conceive children as bodyless minds.