Childhoods in Brasília: listening to the children's voices in a church’s playground
Childhoods. Right to participation. Brasília. Playground. Church
This academic work is part of studies on childhood and aims to understand the voices of children in their experiences in the playground of a religious community located in Brasília, Brazil. The theoretical contribution is based on the field of studies of childhood(s), in a transdisciplinary perspective with the sociology of childhood, geography of childhood, anthropology of childhood(s), pedagogy of everyday life and comparative studies in education. The search for understanding children’s voices is anchored in the necessary articulation between the contents produced by them, which have singular and universal meanings. It is noteworthy that the record of what children say in academic research is linked to rights inscribed in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children, of 1989. Academic research is guided by a qualitative approach through participatory research, articulating with the theoretical and methodological contributions of ethnographic studies of childhood. Due to the complexity of the research object, its understanding requires a diversified repertoire of methodological procedures capable of substantiating the hearing of children’s voices in the context of the playground. The first immersions in the field point to the playground as a place that allows the full development of children, through discoveries and the elaboration of peer culture. Children build narratives, operate with laws of physics and create explanations for phenomena as they play. However, the subordination of this generational group to adults limits their going to the playground, as it is the adults who decide and control the spaces and times of childhood(s).