"The aunt can't choose because she is not a child": the participation of young children in research in the pandemic context

Abstract

This article discusses the participation of young children in investigative processes with/about them in public educational institutions in the pandemic context. The research was carried out with four classes of the 2nd period, composed of children aged between five and six years old, in four public school units of Early Childhood Education located in peripheral regions of the Federal District during the school year of 2021. It was outlined in a performative ethnographic approach through artistic-pedagogical practices of reading mediation and storytelling in a virtual and face-to-face context, with the following instruments: participant observation, conversational dynamics, story workshops, play activities workshops and written, pictorial and audiovisual elements of the narrative production of young children. Priority was given to the construction of a theoretical-methodological unit with the indissociability between theory and practice in the dialogical processes of the research, so that the participation of young children was markedly present in the doings of this research on childhoods, narratives and pandemic daily lives. The participation of young children was present in different stages of the investigative process, such as: in the elaboration of the participatory methodology used in the workshops; in the proposals for the choice of books, theatrical games and elaboration of registers through voting; in the participation of collaborative narratives during reading mediation; in the production of photographic records of empirical research; in the production of the book Children Narrators with their oral narratives and pictorial records, and in the choice to be named with their own name in the research.