"Did you come to look at us or write?": uses of the field notebook in research with children in a kindergarten school

Abstract

This article originates in the chapters on methodology of the thesis defended in 2017 in the graduate program of the Faculty of Education of the University of São Paulo (FE-USP), where I present the ethnography performed with black children aged 4-5 in a class in the municipal school Malê Debalê. The text is divided into three parts, namely: in the first moment, I present briefly how the entry into the field of research that I covered for more than one school year took place; in the second, I talk about the chosen unit of observation to record the actions of the children in the class and how and which data collection instruments chosen in interaction with the children brought contributions to the ethnography. In the third moment, the one that deepens the debate presented in the title of the article, I give a description of the social uses of the field notebook by myself and the children to demonstrate how, together with the theories here triggered, the place and the way of doing the research produced the collected materials and the analyzes made. This article is inserted in a broader debate on research with children and their social participation from the sociology of childhood.