O lugar do corpo na educação infantil durante o retorno presencial no Sul de Minas Gerais (2021/22): desafios, estratégias e práticas de gestoras/es e educadoras/es

Abstract

With the return of face-to-face activities in early childhood education in a municipality in the south of Minas Gerais some concerns arose in the educational environment given the new context after the Covid-19 syndemic. Thus, the objective of this study is to understand the strategies adopted by teachers at this stage of teaching with regard to the place of the children's bodies in the face of the pedagogical challenges they faced, the strategies implemented and the educational transformations that occurred during the face-to-face return. The proposal at hand is based on some authors from the sociology of childhood, as well as scholars who focus on the post-structuralist mantle, in order to observe and interpret the controlof bodies and the resistance processes of children and teachers. To collect the empirical material, narrative interviews were carried out with teachers and managers who worked withinthe preschool, as well as some memory records such as 'self-writing' by the researcher of this work. The return to face-to-face activities in times of crisis has brought great concern when it comes to young children and their bodies. In this sense, control relations became increasingly explicit, given the numerous health restrictions that young children were subjected to due to Covid-19, many of them had not even attended preschool or other educational environments. Furthermore, situations of resistance were found, both from children and teachers, in the face of the numerous protocols required when returning to face-to-face activities. We concluded that the challenges faced by management and teachers were numerous, mainly in relation to the use of new technologies, the use of masks, the distance between children, thecontrol of bodies and the relationship with families. The diverse strategies used by the educators were able to minimize the lack of interaction between children and their peers, allow the exploration of other environments outside the rigid structure of the educational unit, develop musicalization and give a new meaning to traditional games in Physical Education classes.