The game is for anyone who wants it: Reflecting on gender in early childhood
Preschool Education. Gender. Science. Games.
School is a space for collective teaching-learning, but it is mainly a place for people who meet, who learn to (co)live and see the world through these encounters. Over the years, it has also served to maintain a model of society and exemplary behaviors of being in society. We understand that school is also a space-time to think about the construction of non-sexist relationships in the face of growing and emergency demands for the creation of a more egalitarian world between the genders of the human species. This study is based on the premise that, from the child's entry into Early Childhood Education, we can promote, autonomously and consciously, reflection on roles determined by gender, from play experiences, in order to contribute to the deconstruction of stereotypes defined by a patriarchal society. The main objective of the work is to investigate the (re)production of gender roles in Early Childhood Education, through games and the assumptions of Scientific Literacy (CHASSOT, 2018), in an Early Childhood Education class, at a school located in the West Zone of city of Rio de Janeiro-RJ. This is qualitative research based on narrative research methodology. As an educational product, a collection of non-sexist games was created to enable reflection on the gender roles imposed in society. The games were experienced by the children who narrated about the playing experience. The children's speeches/narratives were audiorecorded and later analyzed based on Ginzburg's evidential paradigm (2010), in order to understand evidence of women's place in society and science. The results indicate that the studies and practices, developed during the research, reverberated beyond the classroom space and became a tool for transforming the teaching practices of other fellow teachers. For the children, it proved to be a potentially transformative educational experience, capable of contributing to a more just and egalitarian society through dialogues that recognize diversity as a constituent of the human being and neutralize any type of exclusion or gender-based violence.