Babies; Child education; Teaching; Autoethnography.

ALMEIDA, Carla Silva. Babies and Early Childhood Education: living through gaps. 2024. 120p. Dissertation (Master’s in Education, Contemporary Contexts and Popular Demands). Institute of Education/Multidisciplinary Institute, Seropédica/Nova Iguaçu, RJ, 2024.

This dissertation, “Babies and Early Childhood Education: living through gaps”, aims to understand the ways in which teaching and Early Childhood Education have received and responded to the arrival of babies in daycare centers and educational institutions. The research focuses on the visual and textual narratives that emerge from my notebook as a baby teacher, revealing ways to think about teaching with babies by looking at their job as a gesture of welcoming and caring for the baby. The baby as a person in a relationship and its place in society and Early Childhood Education as a space that receives babies in an educational, political and social context. Such paths of reflection find in autoethnography the key to, methodologically, opening the doors that arise from the encounter of my experience as a teacher and researcher of babies, with the theoretical- methodological references of this dissertation, with the literary poetry and imagery of literature children, together with images and narratives of babies and children in the day- to-day life of the daycare center. Autoethnography as a methodology seeks in one's own experiences ways of understanding the subjects and the place in which one is inserted, starting from the perspective of what one experiences when immersed in the environment and relationships. Thinking about my experience as a teacher, in research with and about babies, allows this study to be a small opening in the face of the need for the academic field to weave studies that present baby teachers and babies as research subjects, composing a dialogue of theory with everyday practice. The theoretical analysis starts from the intertwining with the thoughts of authors from different fields of knowledge, who seek to conceptualize babies, Early Childhood Education and their relationship with society, through the studies of Donald Winnicott, Hannah Arendt, Jorge Larrosa and Ailton Krenak. The research was carried out in a Municipal Day Care Center in Rio de Janeiro, based on the daily records of three groups of babies in the last three years (2021, 2022 and 2023). In this study, the encounter between teachers, babies and their relational and collective lives takes place between the doors of the daycare center. In addition to their materiality and functionality as an object that corresponds to the entrance and exit of a space, doors allow us to look, question and reflect on the absences and presences, movements and permanence, freedom and control present in the daily lives of babies in daycare. Throughout the dissertation we close and open doors, we peek into cracks that meet the eyes of babies from six narrative events that show us the ways in which relationships occupy space, time, rules, organizations and above all, the people who are in the nursery. From the experiences recorded and described, we understand that teaching is an opening door to welcoming babies. Through this encounter, the baby establishes the means of becoming a subject of desire, freedom and autonomy, based on the ways in which they are supported by the gestures of their educators. Gestures that guarantee them the conditions to feel free to build their lives in relationship with themselves, with other babies and children in daycare and in their lives in society.