Social participation of children in play: approaches to childhood cultures in early childhood education

Abstract

This paper focus on the social participation of children in the context of early childhood education and aims to analyze how a child can join and stay in ongoing collective situations of play with same-age partners. First of all we attempt to problematize the notion of childhood cultures conceived in the field of the sociology of childhood studies and to situate theoretical approaches to play in a social and cultural perspective, focusing on the relationships between play and childhood cultures. Then, we seek to expose the methodological configurations of the investigation. The data were based on the concepts of the Sociology of Childhood, from an ethnographic research perspective, carried out with 25 three-year-old children of both sexes. The results indicate that the playgroups were formed based on strategies that used friendship as the main reason for a child joining and staying in the situations of play.

Keywords

• Brincadeiras
• Culturas da infância
• Educação infantil