Lendo e escrevendo a cidade com crianças: um estudo sobre a cidade de Maricá como um (con)texto alfabetizador

Abstract

This research is the result of a dissertation in the Postgraduate Programme in Education - Formative Processes and Social Inequalities (PPGedu/UERJ), linked to the line of research Policies, Rights and Inequalities, and aims to investigate the mobility and spatial practices of a group of students from a public school in the municipality of Maricá/RJ. Its theoretical-methodological foundation is based on bibliographical studies and ethnographic research with children, using methodological procedures such as listening to children's narratives, their drawings, writings and photographs. The participants in the study were children up to the age of 12, as established by Law No. 8,069 of the Statute of the Child and Adolescent, who attended the 5th year of Primary School I in the morning in 2022 and continued in 2023 to attend the 6th year of Primary School II in the afternoon. In the course of planning the research, the proposal was to accompany them for two years, with the aim of investigating their understanding of the city where they live, in view of the scant research that gives visibility to childhoods and their subjects as protagonists of their stories, especially about their spatial practices in the city (Tavares, 2003). The study is based on the Geography of Childhood (Lopes, 2008, 2013), with the aim of deepening the concept that geographical space is a significant component in human formation. In addition, it is understood that children's readings of the city in which they live and exercise their spatial practices should be problematised in their schooling processes, and the public school is a fundamental territorial component for deepening their view of the city, understood in this research as a "book of spaces", conducive to the experience of "reading the world", as Paulo Freire (1986) teaches. It is therefore argued that children, as a specific generational group, when they experience the urban space, can become subjects of their spatial practices and connoisseurs of this practised space, taking the city as a privileged place for their daily literacy. The research aims to reflect on the meanings of the spaces experienced and the relationship between a group of children and the city of Maricá, recognising the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1991) as a right to be learnt and won at school.