Nurturing quality in early childhood education in/with nature: an undertone conversation with a community of practice

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/1980-4512.2025.e104931

Keywords:

Early childhood education, More than human world, Professional development

Abstract

Concerns about quality in education tend to reveal the inexorable weight of the sciences of the bigger, the quantifiable, the established, the dominant. Systems are sought to monitor and measure educational environments, pedagogical practices and children's learning, in which the data generated is compared and hierarchized, producing greater policies and pedagogies. In this focus group interview, we will explore the journey of a community of practices made up of nursery school teachers, teachers and higher education researchers who, for the last four years, have been venturing into more and less urban spaces of nature and culture with children aged 0 to 6 in the south of Portugal. Throughout the talk, stories will be told of training that, based on the principles of pedagogical isomorphism, promote other relationships between children and the world. In this way, the quality of early childhood education is rethought in a smaller tone, a tone that “undermines” the dominant one by inventing ways of becoming with.

Author Biographies

Elisabete Xavier Gomes, Instituto Politecnico de Setubal

Elisabete Maria Xavier Vieira Gomes. Concluiu o(a) Doutoramento em Ciências da Educação em 2011/10/04 pelo(a) Universidade Nova de Lisboa Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Mestrado em Ciências da Educação em 2003/07/23 pelo(a) Universidade Nova de Lisboa Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas e Licenciatura em Ciências da Educação em 1996/10/15 pelo(a) Universidade de Coimbra Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação. É Professor Adjunto no(a) Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal e Co-coordenadora do Mestrado em Educação Pré-escolar e Ensino do 1.º CEB no(a) Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal - Escola Superior de Educação. Publicou 22 artigos em revistas especializadas. Possui 16 capítulo(s) de livros e 1 livro(s). Organizou 1 evento(s). Orientou 39 dissertação(ões) de mestrado. Recebeu 1 prémio(s) e/ou homenagens. Participa e/ou participou como Bolseiro de Doutoramento em 1 projeto(s) e Investigador em 4 projeto(s). Atua na(s) área(s) de Ciências Sociais com ênfase em Ciências da Educação, Ciências Sociais com ênfase em Ciências da Educação e Ciências Sociais com ênfase em Ciências da Educação com ênfase em Educação Geral. Nas suas atividades profissionais interagiu com 60 colaborador(es) em coautorias de trabalhos científicos. No seu currículo Ciência Vitae os termos mais frequentes na contextualização da produção científica, tecnológica e artístico-cultural são: Formação de professores; Arte e educação; Pedagogy; Práticas artísticas; Práticas pedagógicas; Interdiscursividade; Interdisciplinaridade; Teachers' training; Artistic practices; Pedagogical practices; Interdiscursitiy; Interdisciplinarity; Formação contínua de professores; Experiências pedagógicas; Arte; Educação; Educação formal, não-formal e informal; Primary School; Teachers Professional Developement, Relations Between Art and Education; Formação de educadores; Investigação em Educação; Escolas; Inovação Educacional; children´s participation; public space of education; qualitativa research; "bem comum"; democracy; education; common/s; childhood; Infância; Democratização; Democracia Cultural; Desenvolvimento Humano; Política Europeia; Aprendizagem ao Longo da Vida; Desenvolvimento; Tecnologia; Ensino das Ciências e da Matemática; teoria da educação; Experiência; Experiências Pedagógicas; n/a; .

Maria Assunção Folque, University of Évora

Maria Assunção Folque is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Évora – Department of Education and Pedagogy, involved in pre-school and primary teachers’ training; her research interests are in pedagogy and learning, quality ECE and Education for Sustainability, listening to children. Using sociocultural theories of learning, particularly activity theory.

Mariana Valente, University of Évora

I am a retired Assistant Professor (tenured) in the Physics Department at the University of Évora and an integrated researcher at the IHC - pole of the University of Évora - and IN2PAST. My CV reflects a pattern that, if I look at it now, I can see it as inscribed since past times, in my initial phase as a young physics degree student and which has been developing and maturing in many encounters, uncertain encounters that have been building me up, and multiplying my research interests. From early times, my work was crossed by a taste for putting scientific concepts into context; by an appeal to cross borders in the fields of knowledge; by a love for the Earth (as a physics undergraduate I immersed myself in geophysics), by the sense of educational value of TIC. I was born a physics didact, as a researcher, but I quickly realised that I would have to enrich the field by travelling through historical texts and philosophy, in the sense of the beautiful Ernst Mach’s work (1838-1916). Meeting philosopher Isabelle Stengers gave me confidence in the value of the paths I did want to follow. Coming out of her seminars I was filled with joy, with the revelation of something that continues to accompany me in research and in life - the development of a sense of the importance of "things", of ideas. Then I grew as an historian of science, from a perspective of pedagogical valorisation. I have immersed myself in historical texts remarkable to me where I saw pedagogical value. The text on animal breathing by Lavoisier and Séguin, where nature and society are compared; the foundational text of electromagnetism by Oersted; the texts by Robert Mayer where intuition and that certainty that something very new and very important is at stake - the beginnings of the concept of energy - among many others, are among those texts of pedagogical value. With Oersted and Mayer I have discovered ways of tuning with nature, and then I discovered the romantics and their importance. Gestures were contaminating me. At the same time, I travelled to museums and art exhibitions and discovered books in bookshops that were real interdisciplinary encounters, such as "An optics of visual experience" by Georg Maier (1986), "Wonder, The Rainbow and the Aesthetics of rare Experiences" by Philip Fisher (1998), and L'idée d'énergie au tournant des Lumières by Michel Delon (1988), among others. I also began to take an interest in art history, and what discoveries! Objects and gestures have an importance there that we didn't find in the history of science at the time. I found in John Gage's History of Art questions like where the triangular glass prism that appears in Newton's hands comes from I found in John Gage's History of Art. There are the objects! And I have learnt to immerse myself in them with passion, organising various exhibitions with historical teaching objects. Diverting towards the Romantics, the questioning of the absolute, total, value of universal laws in our knowledge of the world emerges. The desire to complement that with direct experience of the world emerges. As the philosopher Alfred Whitehead said, we can know everything about the Earth's rotation, about electromagnetism and its interaction with matter, but nothing replaces the direct contemplation of a sunset. With Goethe, the “romantic” I have discovered, we have discovered, delicate empiricism, a way of getting to know nature I have been practising with other researchers, teachers, educators and students of all ages and from different areas of knowledge. Borrowing the words of Filomena Molder (2022) since they are the right words, I wouldn't say that Goethe wasn't a man of science. With his extraordinary gift of observation and his curiosity always in its nascent stage, he was interested in everything in the abundance and variety of the Earth. And it is in this phase of attention to the natural world that I find myself developing ways of loving the Earth in collaboration with many others!

Vanessa Santos Kene

Licenciada em Educação de Infância e Pós-Graduação em Educação em Creche e outros equipamentos com crianças dos 0 aos 3 anos na Escola Superior de Educação de Lisboa. Educadora de Infância na Associação Tempo de Mudar para o Desenvolvimento do Bairro dos Lóios. Lisboa, Portugal

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Published

2025-10-31

Issue

Vol. 27 (2025): Publicação Contínua - Zero-a-Seis (Jan./Dez.2025)

Section

Dossiê: Parâmetros de qualidade da educação infantil: disputas, conflitos e desafios

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Copyright (c) 2025 Elisabete Xavier Gomes, Maria Assunção Folque, Mariana Valente, Vanessa Santos Kene

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