Kids Playing At School: Ethnography about Race, Gender, Class and Region
PEREIRA, Simone dos Santos; NASCIMENTO, Silvana de Souza

Abstract
The school curriculum is the most important feature to understand what types of values are desired to a community. No matter in what level it is being proposed, from the country's government policies to the closed door classroom, specific curriculum strategies and contents are planned and executed in order to teach the students one’s view. The main aim of this paper is to unveil how the social markers of difference such as race, gender, class, profession, etc are interconnected and are experienced by children at school. This anthropological study has been carried out since 2018 in a kindergarten school on the outskirts of the city of São Paulo, in Brazil. It is based on the ethnographic method with a participant observation technique. This institution has been chosen because its curriculum proposal is very singular considering others schools in the country. It focuses on the diversity, which includes concerns about race, ethnicity, gender, social class, religion, among others social markers. The selected teachers have been working, since 2014, to clarify how power relations were constructed in Brazil in order to classify people, hierarchizing relationships. At the same time, they conduct teaching how to identify, understand and face inequalities in the interest of overcoming them. This paper discusses that kids are involved by multiple discourses and, in a way, they understand how they face stereotypes in society and the political issues proposed by the school pedagogical practice. Primarily observations indicate that confrontations take place on daily basis when conservative children, families and educators face the new progressive ideas proposed by the school curriculum, they are normally related to stagnated hierarchies (and consequently inequalities) on gender, race, ethnicity, profession, etc.

Full Text: PDF