Interactions and play

childhood curriculum as experiences of the 'unseen'

Resumo

The article proposes a reflection on the Early Childhood Education curriculum based on the notions of event, deconstruction, and experience, in dialogue with the works of Jacques Derrida and Clarice Lispector. The epigraph from Memoirs of the Blind, by Derrida, and fragments from Água Viva, by Lispector — which reveal a writing marked by “not seeing” — are taken as a metaphor for the unpredictability that constitutes the curricula lived with childhoods. We return to the most recent curriculum policies for Early Childhood Education — the National Curriculum Guidelines for Early Childhood Education (DCNEI, 2009) and the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC, 2018) — where the centrality of interactions and play as structuring axes of pedagogical practice in Early Childhood Education is emphasized, as a possibility to question the way these elements may be captured by a prescriptive logic. In another direction, we argue in favor of a curriculum as an unpredictable event, movements of otherness, and subjectivation processes that escape normativity, associating it with the metaphor of “blind writing,” from Derrida, as a potential way to think of a curriculum built in the encounter with the other and the unexpected — not as error, but as a creative gesture. Likewise, the discontinuous and non-linear flow of Clarice Lispector’s writing is called upon as an image of an inventive curriculum, open to difference and to the multiplicity of childhoods, as an ethical and aesthetic invitation to think of the school as a space of shared experiences, where interactions and play, as well as the curriculum itself, function as acts of invention, resistance, and expression of differences.