Modos outros de pensar a infância: um convite ao pensamento a partir da educação especial

Abstract

The modes of thinking and producing childhood in school were the subjects that motivated this master’s thesis research, which sought to problematize the effects of linking Special Education practices to Early Childhood Education to produce childhood, considering the expansion of school attendance policy to the age of four. For that, nine (9) Special Education teachers from Santa Maria/RS, Brazil, who articulate their practices with Early Childhood Education were invited to think about childhood production and its practices in this scenario. Based on post-structuralist studies, especially in Michel Foucault studies about discourse, understanding it as a practice that produces subjects, truths and, therefore, realities, I sought to understand what childhood is being produced. From Special Education teachers’ perspective, I was able to highlight that the discourses produced in the articulation of the investigated practices operate as a biopolitical governmentality strategy for capturing childhood in advance and producing a way of being from an ideal of normality, as risk management practice. I noticed that this mode of childhood production started to establish the processes of government in school, in the articulation of Special Education practices in Early Childhood Education and in families, producing, as an effect, a child subjectivity that made it possible to create a way of being to childhood: the deficient childhood. In this context, I visualized two inseparable perspectives that think the modes of being to childhood that produce as an effect, a way of thinking childhood from the naturalization of the normalization practices put in operation by the Special Education and determined by the will to know and the will of truth about childhood. On the other hand, but not the opposite, a potent resistance movement that thinks childhood from another place, that sought to denaturalize the static, universal and essentialist definitions of human development, allowing to perceive childhood as heterotopia, as becoming infinite and multiple, unnamed, always indeterminate, which disturbs this linear and progressive notion of normality, but which makes possible its becoming. Another way of seeing and thinking childhood that demonstrates possibilities at school. These two analyzes supported reflections on some of the possible effects of the ways of thinking and producing childhood, based on Special Education practices in the context of Early Childhood Education, which remain an invitation to think.