Children's Performances: an invitation to unseeing with children

ABSTRACT

In this article, we aimed to problematize the image performances carried out by 3-year-old children and how these productions cross the context in which they were created: an Early Childhood Education school and a doctoral research in progress. We discuss the intertwining and reverberations of the conceptions of childhood that direct education and the potencies of the images fraught with childhood that create possibilities of cracking the singular and adult-centric ways of being, feeling, and living. It is concluded that, guided by an ethical, aesthetic and political intention, the children's performances create possibilities and announce the urgency of other postures when inhabiting childhood spaces.

Keywords:
Children; Image Productions; Early Childhood Education; Childhood; Performances

RESUMO

Neste artigo se objetiva problematizar performances imagéticas realizadas por crianças de 3 anos e o modo como essas produções atravessam o contexto em que foram criadas: uma escola de Educação Infantil e uma pesquisa de doutorado em desenvolvimento. Discutem-se os entrelaces e os revérberos das concepções de infância que direcionam a educação e a potência das imagens repletas de infância que criam possibilidades de fissurar os modos únicos e adultocêntricos de ser, estar, sentir, viver. Conclui-se que, guiadas por uma intenção ética, estética e política, as performances infantes das crianças criam possibilidades e anunciam a urgência de outras posturas ao habitar-se espaços da infância.

Palavras-chave:
Crianças; Produções de Imagens; Educação Infantil; Infância; Performances

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article vise à problématiser les performances d'imagerie réalisées par des enfants de 3 ans et la manière dont ces productions traversent le contexte dans lequel elles ont été créées : une école d'éducation préscolaire et une recherche doctorale en développement. Il discute de l'entrelacement et des réverbérations des conceptions de l'enfance qui orientent l'éducation et du pouvoir des images pleines d'enfance qui créent des possibilités de briser les façons uniques et centrées sur l'adulte d'être, de ressentir, de vivre. Il est conclu que, guidés par une intention éthique, esthétique et politique, les performances infantiles des enfants créent des possibilités et annoncent l'urgence d'autres postures lorsqu'il s'agit d'habiter les espaces de l'enfance.

Mots-clés:
Enfants; Productions d'Images; L'Éducation des Enfants; L'enfance; Les Performances

Introduction

Midway, the children enriched me more than Socrates. For my imagination has no track. And I do dislike beaten tracks. I like deviating and unseeing (Manoel de Barros, our translation)¹².

Figure 1
You can't catch me! – Record by Oliver, 3 years old.³

The path in which children have enriched us more than Socrates is being followed in a doctoral research in progress, which is driven by the following question: how much childhood fits in Early Childhood Education?. Based on it, a group of 14 3-year-old students and their three teachers, inhabitants of an Early Childhood Education school in the municipality of Campo Grande/MS, were research partners during the 2021 school year. In this partnership, conversations, observations, games and image productions were carried out.

This article proposes to walk, specifically, along with the children's image productions carried out in the research. Productions that occurred during playtime, usually the last hour of the children's stay at school, at which time a cell phone was left with the toys and anyone who wanted could create images (videos or photos) of the school. Then, in a cartographic posture (Rolnik, 2016; Barros; Kastrup, 2015), we opened ourselves to encounters with the performativities created by the children, being crossed by the potencies of others possibilities in research, writing, education. This article moves along the tracks of these possibilities.

The question that launched us into these meetings, announced in the previous paragraph, derives from the discussions about the conception of childhood as a phase of life to be overcome and that sees the child as someone to be formed – a foreigner in our world. This conception is the most common and the strongest in our society. However, there is another conception, in which childhood is a state of existence – almost an un-age – and which is made as multiplicity. Childhoods, plural (Tebet, 2019). Examining Early Childhood Education, a school phase in which young children are, was a necessary movement for us to problematize the relations and the reverberations of these childhoods (in any of the conceptions said) in this setting and the way they act on children and also the way children act on them.

Accordingly, the images produced by the children in this context, image productions understood by us, in this article, as children's performances, appear as a potency for us to problematize and move amid the intertwining between childhood, Early Childhood Education, research and children. Thus, this article aims to problematize the images produced by children and the way they cross the context in which they were created: an Early Childhood Education school and a doctoral research that walked there.

This article presents some discussions on the four marks that guide the most widespread conception of childhood in Western culture since Plato. Subsequently, we discuss another conception, which is distant from these marks: childhood as a state of human existence. We address the technologies used by children to produce the images and, then, together with the children's image performances, we discover, invent, unlearn when faced with their creations of existence in a school and in a research in Early Childhood Education. As Manoel de Barros says, children create deviations and make us see many things. And this childlike movement is urgently needed as part of the Early Childhood Education that we experience in schools!

Childhood as subalternity: the four marks are still around

In every epoch there was (and there still is) a set of disciplinary norms that prescribe what it is to be a child, how it is to play, what their tastes are, how they think, what they should know, think and say at each age; and what it is to have a childhood. The child and childhood are captured by the ideas we produce about them; we create ways to imprison them, making it seem that everything about them can be anticipated, leaving very little for the unexpected and for encounters (Chisté, 2015, p. 54-55).

The capture said by Bianca Santos Chisté (2015) comes from the times of Plato, where the child and childhood were defined according to four marks: possibility, inferiority, the other despised, and material of politics. Marks that saw the child as a possibility of being anything in the after, because in the now they were nothing. Marks that understood the child as an inferior being hierarchically (as well as women and older people) that needed to be guided like sheep by their shepherd, because they did not have control of their body, mind, voice. Marks that indicated that the child was the other despised within society, a type of criminal devoid of the necessary knowledge to be considered as being from within the established territory. So they took care of the unimportant things. Marks that, finally, treated the child as political material, the future of society that, still malleable, would be formed and shaped (Kohan, 2005).

These marks, even with records so distant, even if written in the past, still seem to support the concept of childhood and, consequently, the ways of living with children in society. Over the centuries, the mark that understands the child as a political object has become the main one with regard to the assumptions of the formation of children, especially in the educational context, since there is always the discourse that children are formed for the future of the country, of society. However, there are also traces of the other marks behind this discourse. Children are still seen as a pure possibility of being something only afterwards, they are still seen as minors, as the other despised, because “the truth is that we maintain a relationship with children as if they were a minority, a shortage, a precarious state” (Couto, 2013, p. 55, our translation). Thus,

[…] children are permanent objects of biopolitics, because there are no territories more elusive than those of children; it is necessary to operate on them and we operate effectively all the time on them, on the bodies of children. And, in this manner, we act incessantly on them to attribute to them ways of being, ways of life, a process of schooling (Abramowicz, 2019, p. 18, our translation).

Children are formed for the after through the discourse that they will be the future of society, that they will be responsible for better times. The time of the now, of childhood, is seen as a time of preparation, of wait, in which one never, in fact, is. Time when one talks wrongly, spells wrongly, behaves wrongly. In which bodies, minds, laughs, games, ways of living, being and being in the world need to be controlled, molded. Because the child has a specific role: to be taught. Be taught to fit inside an already established shape. Where everything that escapes is silenced (Kohan, 2005).

This movement stems from the activity of a capitalistic subjectivity. Subjectivity that governs our relations with the worlds, with others, with ourselves. And that we carry in our actions, experiences, lives, guiding our steps. According to Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik (1986, p. 16, our translation), it even produces “[…] that which happens when we dream, when we daydream, when we fantasize, when we fall in love and so on. In any case, it intends to ensure a hegemonic function in all these fields.”

Capitalistic subjectivity that silences what is not common. That controls until everything lowers to the level of the masses. That homogenizes differences. At school, in particular, it places the child in queued desks, sitting for hours, unable to move beyond what is necessary. That controls the tone of the laughter, until it is no longer heard. That determines the duration of playtime, until it is completely over.

The opposite of childhood is what we can call ‘a being without gestures’. The adult knows how to confine the childhood, how to defeat it. And maybe this being without gesture is one of the metaphors of education. One of the most frequent. One of the least interesting. One of the most harmful (Skliar, 2012, p. 19, our translation).

The being without gestures occupies the school, full of children and their childhoods. And silences that multiplicity. There is, then, a child, singular, because there is only one way to be a child, already imposed. There is, then, childhood, without plural, because there is a single perspective, in which childhood is a phase of formation, of waiting, in which it is the chronological time that guides their actions. A phase of life in which what children do, talk, practice is not valid because they are still hierarchically inferior, without validated knowledge, they are still nothing, because they will only be someone when they grow up.

And in an Early Childhood Education school, where are the little kids? How can these marks act on children and their childhoods? Anete Abramowicz (2019) points to an increasingly strong schooling and silencing process in Early Childhood Education resulting, precisely, from the imposition of this perspective concerning childhood that sees the child as a political project of the State, a being to be molded.

Based on this, we launch ourselves into a children's movement: asking ourselves (Kohan; Carvalho, 2021). We wonder then what can be accomplished by the performances of children who occupy a Early Childhood Education school. To what extent do they reverberate in capitalistic subjectivities, to what extent can they make them crumble? Can they subvert these marks that still guide conceptions of childhood and children?

We look at the potency of these children's creations guided by other ways of understanding childhood and our relationships with children, at what they produce and how they permeate education.

Childhood: the potency to ascend to a state of existence

So it required unseeing the world to exit that place immensely and without side.

We wanted to find images of birds blessed with innocence.

What we learned in that place was just ignorances for us to well understand the voice of the waters and of the snails.

We liked the words when they disturbed the normal sense of ideas (Barros, 2010, p. 450, our translation).

Disturbing the normal sense of ideas has to do, for us, with another perspective of childhood, which has not to do with the phase of life, but with the state of existence. A perspective that does not see marginality as inferiority, but rather as another possibility. There, on the border, there is creation of the potency of other ways of being, being in the world, living. This other childhood is guided by the time of intensities, aeon, where there is no past, present, future, but crossing. Childhood that anyone can reach, and can become the one

[…] who does not say everything, does not know everything and does not think everything, but who thinks again and makes think again. It is the one that, in the impossibility of expressing oneself, creates meanings, recovers ideas, scans functionings, and narrates what was experienced. Therefore, walking towards childhood means rediscovering our own childlike condition (Flores, 2017, p. 184, our translation).

And then, children (plural)! Because they occupy the different spaces in the most different ways, creating, inventing, performing, escaping the unique way of being a child.

And then, childhoods (plural)! Because there are several ones, resonating in the school hallways, in the laughs, in the jokes, in the bodies, in the words, in the writings, in the images… childhoods of children and of whosoever allow themselves to reach them.

Figure 2
Let me show you the drawing of me and the dinosaur! – Davi, 3 years old.

It is necessary to emphasize that there is no abandonment of the other perspective, of childhood as an age, but an expansion of meanings. Childhood becomes distant from being, only, a phase to be crossed as soon as possible. It is no longer the lack of something, the phase inhabited by those who need to be shaped. With the expansion of meaning, childhood also becomes discontinuity, the possible, not what must be, but what can be. Thus, the absence of speech is constant because we are always learning to speak (whatever that speech is). There is no way to be entirely adult, because we never definitively know language (Agamben, 2005).

Being a child is, then, not knowing how to speak everything, not knowing how to think everything, not being everything. The child is the one who is not fully formed, who did not lower to the masses, doing, saying, living like everyone else. Dreaming like everyone else. To be a child is to be part of minorities, because minorities do not group together, do not follow a model. They are potency, always in process (Kohan, 2005).

In order to express different childhoods and record them in some way, the production of images arose as a power for this movement. Not images to be analyzed, scrutinized, understood. But images that are invitations. To bare our gaze, unlearn, unknow, unsee. To think and move with children, with childhoods, with sensations. To look again and again and again and again and again and always find something to be discovered. Images recorded with a cell phone that, as Barros (2010) says, is not used to function, but to make miracles out of ants, mosses, flowers.

They, children and images, present me with other possibilities of senses and not senses of the body, free the body from having only one function, one use, one sense, of being only an organism taken over by biology. Children save the body from the poverty of being just a body. It seems that children do not accept that the door can be opened only with their hands, that things can be held only with their hand, that eyes serve only to look at the hours, serve only to look at the task on the board, that they see the grape, that with their feet it is only possible to walk (Chisté, 2015, p. 69, our translation).

Children and images question and break with the scientificity imposed by a society that seems to already know everything, already have experienced everything. This even resonates with the established concept of technology. Technologies defined as “[…] a set of scientific knowledge and principles that apply to the planning, construction and use of equipment in a given type of activity” (Kenski, 2007, p. 24, our translation). In this sense, the author also points out that these technologies are not necessarily presented in the physical form of equipment (such as pens, cell phones, computers), since language, for example, is also a technology.

Thus, we understand that technologies are also presented as movements that allow humans to think, plan and create processes, plans, products. Millions of years ago, technologies were bones used by primates to hunt and survive, just as language was the technology of those who intended to disseminate wisdom, knowledge, traditions, followed by writing, which, when recording this information, took away from memory the responsibility of passing on knowledge. Currently, technologies are diverse and are constituted in different ways, now also in the digital world. Vani Kenski (2007) also points out that the skills in dealing with these technologies are called techniques.

There is a point here that we propose to question, thinking from this other perspective of childhood, which is presented as a subversion of the unique and dichotomous modes: the scientificity necessary for a set of principles or knowledge to be considered technology. Here, we see a trace of the production of capitalistic subjectivities that imposes knowledge and doings and that reduces what is produced in life. This reduction occurs because what is scientific is already understood as true, already has validated assumptions, is already taken for granted. Is already known. And, thus, everything is reduced to what is already established.

Reduction unifies that which is diverse or multiple, either that which is elementary or that which is quantifiable. Thus, reductive thinking attributes 'true' reality not to totalities, but to elements; not to qualities, but to measures; not to beings and entities, but to formalizable and mathematable utterances (Morin, 2019, p. 27, our translation).

Is there scientificity in the records produced by children and their childhoods? Is there scientificity in the performances of children with a cell phone in their hands, producing images? It seems to us that thinking in this direction implies questioning the scientificity that is already established, which reduces and, consequently, disregards what is produced by those who are not part of society in a way such that they have a validated voice. And what is produced in childhood, which is considered a phase of the voiceless? We intend, then, based on that, to crack our already established truths.

Figure 3
Looking through the gaps – Record by Théo, 3 years old.

This crack, the possible created by children and their childhoods, implies thinking of technologies as practices of experimentation guided by techniques of invention, which enable us to build, feel and think our worlds. In this movement, beyond the imposed discourses and the masks that sometimes establish ways of use, production, living, technologies become sensitive technologies, where the creation of knowledge becomes the creation of existences. Techniques become the ways we make it possible to feel, the affections that come to us. It is an unfolding of being, an inventive twist to produce possible worlds. Technique, from this perspective, is micropolitics⁴ in acts (Fonseca; Costa; Kirst, 2008, Mendonça et al., 2010).

There is empowerment of the production of subjectivities (others, which resist capitalistic subjectivities) that are made, incessantly, from the encounters with the other, in the vibratable, in the folds of the skin that extends and folds when being touched by the force of what it sees, which is also made with technologies. In the encounters between humans, machines, knowledge, we experience and invent worlds, we create existential territories. With this, it is possible to disaccustom the already established modes of looking, feeling, living (Mansano et al., 2009).

In the encounter with the children's digital performances, we open ourselves to a movement of ignorance, fumbling according to the forces that guide the vibratable. With the folds that are made it is possible to record, in the creation of skin, machines and affections, traces, experiences, building ontological conceptions of the world. With the technologies of the sensitive “[…] an entire world is individualized together with the individuation of breathless astonishment in a half-open mouth facing the untimely, or together with an estrangement without frowning that does not measure others according to themselves” (Fonseca; Costa; Kirst, 2008, p. 39, our translation).

These productions enable records of singular modes of existence, empowering a listening to these differences. Listening to these differences, silencing our fully-reasoned understandings. Listening (in any way) to children and their childhoods, because “a childhood without a voice is, perhaps, the greatest of all misfortunes” (Skliar, 2018, p. 260, our translation). Thus, technologies in this work are understood as sets of knowledge and principles, but also as ways of acting, feeling, thinking and fumbling the world, through encounters, cracking established modes and introducing new forms of subjectivation.

Children's image performances: an invitation to create new modes of existence

Childhood – what was it really? What was it, childhood? One cannot inquire about it except with this astonished question – what was it? That stinging, that astonishment, that continuous being-unable-to-do-it-another-way, that sweet, deep, radiating feeling-the-tears-springing? What was that? (Rilke, 2007, p. 123, our translation).

As said, the discussions presented in this text come from a doctoral research in progress that began to walk questioning how much childhood fits in Early Childhood Education. Therefore, during 2021, a class of 14 3-year-old children and their three teachers were followed at an Early Childhood Education school in the municipality of Campo Grande/MS, Brazil. During our stay there, we observed, talked, played, experienced… Another action, on which we focused specifically in this article, was the production of images. Production carried out by one of the researchers, by the teachers of the class and by the children. In this article, we operate with the children's productions.

The productions occurred during playtime, usually the last hour of the children's time in school. A cell phone was left with the toys and anyone who wanted could create images (videos or photos) of the school. We researchers saw traces of the performances as they were performed. This was because, at times, children would disappear from our sight running everywhere and it was not possible to see the performances completely, perhaps just imagine them. However, subsequently, just as those who read this text, we came across the students' creations in the records that were left on the cell phone. Images, videos, sounds⁵ of another Early Childhood Education, of other Early Childhood Educations, produced by the eyes, by the speeches, by the bodies of the children. Images that were invitation to suspend what we already know. Disaccustom eyes, body, mind, speech, life, education.

Guided by their untimely, marginal childhoods, which rid the world of its caducity (Kohan, 2005), children, through a digital technology – which we call here a digital technology of the sensitive – subverted the established meanings. We consider the production of these images as the children's image performances, because we assume that performances can be understood

[…] as an artistic expression in which the body is used as an instrument of communication and art that appropriates objects, situations and places – almost always naturalized and socially accepted – to give them other uses and meanings and propose changes in the forms of perception of what is established (Gonçalves, 2004, p. 88, our translation).

Consistently, we infer that the images produced by the children constitute a form of artistic expression. Made with body, voice, mind, appropriating a naturalized place, which already seems to be so well known to us: a school. Using a cell phone that there, flooded by childhood, becomes a technology for the production of other subjectivities that subvert the already naturalized knowledge derived from capitalistic subjectivity. Subjectivity that has already taught us how to produce an image, what Early Childhood Education is and, even more violently, that understands children as without voice, as one that does not yet know and cannot speak (a speech beyond the voice, but that permeates the entire life experience). A capitalistic subjectivity that was established according to the four marks of Plato that are still here.

The power of these performances without an imposed purpose, which were carried out without a scheduled time to begin or end, without a specific theme is precisely in this process: in amazement, in laughter, in discovery, in vertigo, in cracking. It is in opening gaps between the lines that circumscribe life, childhood, education. Performing at the border, moving from a place where, usually, control is synonymous with success, learning. Perform at the border and, there, create other modes, other forms. Escape the silencing of the marks. Make the absence of speech be due to stuttering, by enchantment. Not having words to describe something, but being able to say it in another way… with a gesture, a joke, a laugh, an image. Perform at the border and achieve that state of existence. An invitation-performance that is process. A child-invitation-performance that permeates the school, research, researchers, education, writing, life.

What is the power of this children's performance that is an invitation in education? Education in a general context because, even though these productions were carried out in a space of Early Childhood Education, we understand that they reverberate far beyond this stage of elementary education. Through this questioning, we find ourselves, again, with these performances. We let them permeate across us.

This crossing led us to realize that children, with their deviations, provide us with clues of ways to inhabit the spaces with them. As they perform, children seem to chart beyond the school space, but also the lives that are there. As they perform, they do it with an intention. An intention that is not produced in the sense of a purpose, but rather through an ontological conception that produces ethical, aesthetic and political rigor.

Figure 4
How am I going to make lyrics and music standing still? – Record by Flor, 3 years old.

Ethical because it speaks of listening and affirming differences. Differences that are made in us and in others. Aesthetic because it does not start from a shape or field already given, but from the creation that is made with the marks embodied in the body, in thought. Political rigor because it speaks of the attitude of struggle with the forms that, incessantly, try to silence marks, the other possible (Rolnik, 1993). The ethical, aesthetic and political rigor removes from the devices the possibilities of use that capture us (Ferraço; Carvalho, 2015). The children's performances operate with that intention.

Figure 5
Look at you and me! I'm filming Gabriel – Record by Gabriel, 3 years old.

Images fraught with ethics because they are produced in differences, operating with them, creating with them, affirming them. Therefore, with these differences, they permeate us as well. As the recording of Gabriel, a student with low vision who filmed us (he and one of the researchers) completely by recording the intertwining of our hands. An ethics that teaches us that sometimes our eyes are so accustomed to the world that it is necessary to see things, in Early Childhood Education and also in life, with other senses. Unseeing, with any sense.

Figure 6
I'm hiding! Where am I? – Record by Théo, 3 years old.

Figure 7
This house is made of bricks. But I’ll knock it down if I blow – Record by Davi, 3 years old.

Aesthetic images because they are not made from the already given truths and knowledge. But rather from the invention of other knowledge, which arises from marks, encounters, affections. Images that show us places to hide in the game of hide-and-seek (or in any other situation) that we would never imagine using. And that maybe we had never even realized they existed out there. Images that show other houses that we do not even notice in that space and that can be blown down with a breath full of childhood, no matter how strong their material is – plastic, bricks, clay, truths. And are we talking here only about the house shown by David?

Figure 8
Why did we make a boat if there is no water for the boat to swim in? – Record by Flor, 3 years old.

Figure 9
Ding dong, ding dong! You may come in and play! – Record by Oliver, 3 years old.

Political images because they are established as resistance to the forms that silence and control. That say what is, what should be, how it should be. They question why craft a folded paper boat that cannot swim because it only finds concrete on the ground. And which show that, in addition to controlling, silencing and teaching and teaching and teaching, we need to ring the bell and listen to what Oliver has to say with laughter: we can come in to play!

Looking, feeling, finding the children's performances also enables us to follow the traces of this ethical, aesthetic and political intention that is the possibility of “subversion of what appears as natural truth and imprisons the production of difference” (Regis; Fonseca, 2012, p. 280, our translation).

We found, in the children's performances, invitations. Invitations to rethink the ways we have inhabited the spaces with them, our postures, our movements. There is not, in these invitations, an imposition or a silencing of what is being done now. In fact, there are possibilities. Instead of analyzing the children's images, looking at them with other senses, unseeing that which is already known, deviating from the already known path, also producing with them. Opening oneself to childhood. Perhaps the greatest invitation is this: instead of looking at childhood from the point of view of the marks that place it in subalternity, distancing oneself from this movement that insists on controlling the childhoods we encounter. Allowing oneself a research, a writing, a life that operates with the childhoods that permeate it. And, who knows, perform too.

And then compose, discover, meet with them other Early Childhood Education, other educations, other researches, other writings… Other modes of being with the children. They escape from the imprisonment in which childhood is often placed, which subvert the naturalized truths, which take the form from the clock that times everything, which create other modes of existing: open, mutant, deforming. Childlike modes that enable the creation of knowledge because this creation is, in fact, creation of existences.

Figure 10
This tree is made of hearts, d’you see? – Record by Bela, 3 years old.

For an Early Childhood Education, a research, a life, a little more…children!

Figure 11
Photographing childhood in the boy's eyes – Record by Oliver, 3 years old.

It's hard to photograph the silence.

But I've tried. I'll tell:

Deep night my village was dead.

No noise heard, no one passing between the houses

I was just leaving a party.

It was almost 4 am in the morning.

Silence walked down the street carrying a drunkard.

I prepared my machine.

Silence was a carrier?

It was carrying the drunkard.

I photographed this carrier.

I had other visions that night.

I prepared my machine anew.

There was a jasmine perfume on the edge of a manor.

I photographed the perfume.

I saw a slug nailed to existence more than to the stone.

I photographed its existence.

I also saw a pardon-blue in a beggar's eye.

I photographed the pardon.

I saw an old landscape collapsing upon a house.

I photographed the upon.

It was hard to photograph the upon (Barros, 2010, p. 379-380, our translation).

Manoel de Barros' poem, a boy playing with words, signals the potency of children's performances produced, here in this text, in an Early Childhood Education school, but which is potency in any space that is allowed to be permeated by childhoods. Performances that, perhaps, distance themselves from the assumption of having a name, a purpose, of being a performance of or about something. They are free performances, made with a digital technology of the sensitive that, in the hands fraught with childhood, does not record what was expected by many, but enables a boy to photograph childhood in his gaze.

A gaze that pervades us, that moves us to stop and notice the differences, then assuming an ethical, aesthetic and political posture when inhabiting a school and a research with children. This cartographic, open, chaotic posture is constituted here of records that subvert the capitalistic subjectivity, the dominant modes and signal an urgency: that of other Early Childhood Educations, other educations, other modes of researching, of living, that assert themselves in differences, that open themselves to new possibilities, that are resistance to silencing. That, in addition to paying attention to the already established truths, also pay attention to the childhoods that are there, filling the corridors, classrooms, researches, life.

The children's images, in free performances within the school, free from the techniques full of scientificity, from the perfect angle or focus, produce movements, even stoppages. They say things, even without sound. They photograph laughter, playfulness, imagination. They also create images of those who see them.

Children possess a sharp imaginative capacity and, therefore, promote the advent of the unpredictable. And it is quite true that the unpredictable brings some discomfort, makes us uncomfortable with our closed truths. The inaugural character of childhood puts us in front of the other, who thinks differently, who speaks differently, who with their endless questions steals us from our own certainties, allows us to experience otherness, the mobilization of our static conceptions (Rosa, 2018, p. 57, our translation).

This discomfort with which we do not want to deal sometimes leads us to act on the unpredictable so as to control it, placing it within a single form of Early Childhood Education, of children, of childhood, of doing research with children. In a society, in a world, in a life that are still attached to the single form, still thinking of a child – in the singular form – because there is only one form, which is still based on Plato's marks. There are — with the children's performances along with a digital technology of the sensitive — others possibilities.

One of the possibilities upon which we stumble, created with the images of childhood, indicates that, instead of teaching everything, controlling everything, silencing everything, until the sameness is repeated, we can start to unlearn. The children’s performances with their childhoods can teach us (yes, children teach us, adults) to unlearn about our conceptions of a single Early Childhood Education, of a single mode of producing images, of a single mode of performing, of a single mode of researching, of a single mode of… so many other things. Thus, who knows, in inhabiting spaces with children, we can operate guided by an ethical, aesthetic and political posture, taught by children, that enables us to open ourselves to the multiplicities of childhoods and lives. An urgent movement of unseeing, of creating deviations in the beaten tracks, for which we always know the end.

The children's performances lead us to rethink not only methodological but also epistemological postures in our movements with children. The point is not only what you do in the field of research, but how you operate in research as a whole – the encounters you have in this process and beyond it, the way we let childhood pervade us. The children's performativity, here, operates as a possibility so that we ask ourselves instead of affirming, unknow what we think we have already seen, unlearn what we think we already know. These artistic expressions, in addition to cracking that which is naturalized, also move those who are permeated by them. Children' performances that do not appropriate and give other uses only to places, objects, but also enable this in modes of being, being in the world, feeling, living. This possibility indicates the urgency of opening ourselves up to other encounters and modes that are potency to create researches, writings, Early Childhood Educations, and lives that are a little more childlike⁶.

Notes

• 1
  Manoel de Barros in an interview given in a letter to José Castello (2012), published in the Jornal Valor Econômico newspaper, on March 16, 2012.
• 2
  Throughout the article, images like this will emerge, which were obtained from the research we discussed here. These are images produced by children in their performances in an Early Childhood Education school. At times, they are discussed explicitly. At other times, more implicitly. This movement is part not only of the aesthetic composition of the article, but also of a political stance, which arises as resistance to our adult-centered bad habit of explaining, in detail, everything that arises. The images here are not explanations, but invitations. Some will be named by the phrases spoken by their producers at the time of record. Others will be named with the title that crossed our minds when we came across them. They will all contain the name and age of their creator.
• 3
  We declare that the research in question was approved by the Ethics Committee of the university in which it is being conducted. We point out that all ethical care was taken, following the procedures and guidelines concerning research with children. We also declare to have the right to display the images and authorization for their use.
• 4
  Macropolitics is understood here as the State, the territories where binarism prevails, the dichotomy. The hard lines that direct, control. Micropolitics is the space of multiplicities, of minorities, of marginals, where singularities prevail. The flexible and insubordinate lines (Kohan, 2005).
• 5
  To preserve the image of the children, following the ethical procedures of the research, in this article we chose to present only photos taken from the videos made by them.
• 6
  This study was financed part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001 and with the support of the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul - UFMS/MEC - Brasil.

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Edited by

Editors-in-charge: Taís Ferreira; Melissa Ferreira; Fabiana de Amorim Marcello

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  02 Dec 2022
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  02 May 2022
• Accepted
  30 Aug 2022