CHILDHOOD AND CHILDREN IN INTEGRAL (FULL-TIME) EDUCATION

This essay proposes a reading of children's social inclusion and social participation processes through the analysis of new ways of institutionalizing childhood, in particular, integral (full-time) education. The fieldwork of the case study consists of a multi-sited ethnography of children's daily lives, conducted with children from six to eight years old in a Belo Horizonte public school. Episodes will be presented as a contribution to the understanding not only of structural constraints on children's experience, but also of the way children give meaning to their experiences. Our reflections concentrate on the paradoxes that shape contemporary childhoods and on the challenges of an education than can overcome the limited status children are given as mere students, by analyzing their rights. Focusing on the complexity of children's social worlds, it is necessary to raise questions at public policies, highlighting the impacts and the tensions suffered by children as social actors in an unequal society.

childhoods; children; integral education