Play and Its (De)Territorialities in Early Childhood Education: Children's Cartographies with Children

Abstract

This article emerges from the encounters with children, childhoods and offal that cross the daily lives of Early Childhood Education, in which playing is presented as a verb of creation, invention and crossing. The research aims to map the (dis)territorialities produced by children in their playing experiences, following the ways in which they invent worlds, displace meanings and make the space-time of Early Childhood Education, a (dis)territory in permanent (dis)composition. The study is an excerpt from a master's research developed with 4 and 5-year-old children in Early Childhood Education institutions in the Agreste region of Pernambuco, inspired by cartography as a follow-up of processes, affections, movements and events. The production of our data took place through participant observations, conversations, records in a field diary, photographs and installations with the children, recognized as cartographers of their own paths. Children's cartographies tell us that children transform scraps into toys, spaces into territories of invention and chronological times into times of experience, creating lines of flight in the face of adult-centric ways of organizing educational life. Thus, playing is a power that disarranges certainties, profanes established uses and inaugurates other ways of inhabiting Early Childhood Education, where childhood insists on being born as an event.