The attempt to convene a discussion about childhood suggests a plurality of educative issues and raises important problems in the context of basic education. To recognize children in their specificity, and to engage and encounter them beyond the discourses produced about them seems to be a challenge today, most especially in the field of childhood education. The large majority of educational discourses assume a notion of childhood as inserted in chronological time, associated with the future, and constituting a doubtful minority. (...) The objective of this paper is to understand what significations and meanings are configuring the discursive practices maintained among teachers about the childhood.I start with the hypothesis that, despite the reconstitution of meaning that has occurred in the field, educators still associate the concept of childhood and its formation with the idea of becoming adult, and presume to explain the notion of childhood technically, in terms of a body of “scientific” knowledge. The research described here is based on an inquiry that took place in various Childhood Education Centers of the Public Municipal Network of the state of Pernambuco, Brazil. Although it is unfinished, this research, based on interviews, suggests that teacher discourses inhabit two discursive temporalities, and two childhoods: on the one side, the affirmation of the same, of unification, of linearity; on the other, the affirmation of difference, of novelty, of the singular. Although they enunciate different meanings for childhood, these meanings are not in themselves contradictory. They do, however, function in some way to maintain a form of schooling that lacks sensitivity to children and a more affirmative relationship to childhood in general, and which encloses itself in an adult vision of what children’s needs might be the. I try to show that those needs exceed the specificity of the teaching and learning typically encountered in schools, and to evaluate to what extent they are affirmed by scholarly notions of childhood. (shrink)

This text is present as a snip of a set of reflexions that composes a dissertation that inserts itself in the current discussion around the place given to children and childhood in the space destined to childhood education in the city of Caruaru – PE, from the understanding of the teacher's discourses that work in that level of education. This work has as an objective to capture the discourses attributed by the teachers of Childhood Education to the children, to the (...) childhood and to the Childhood Education, focusing on the discourses which have subsidized the teachers’ forms of intervention in the space/time of Childhood Education. In this context, we have bound as our investigative field Municipal Centers of Childhood Education in the city of Caruaru – PE (CMEIS), from which it were contemplated 06 Educational Centers and interviewed a total of 12 (twelve) teachers. As a methodological procedure, we used semistructured interviews and for data analysis we supported ourselves in theoretical-methodological contributions of the discourse analysis. We start with the assumption that, despite the changes and the proccess of resignification ocurred in this field, including the own understanding of child, childhood and Childhood Education, the school of the children/childhood is assuming a link with the childhood that inserts it in a chronological time, associating it to the future, to a dubious minority. From a theoretical view, we start from the questioning of the very notion of childhood and Childhood Education, its meanings and the implications of those in the field of child education. The analyzed discourses, distributed in discoursive networks, generally speaking, present various statements and temporalities to the childhood, the child and the Childhood Education, but not excluding ones. Although in all the discourses is possible to identify an enlargement of the concern with tha place of the child, the childhood in the practices of Childhood Education, it shows evidences of permanence so as of changes in the form of discourse to the child, the childhood and, consequently, the Childhood Education. The data, therefore, express a diversity of meanings and interpretations, but indicates how much the school and its subjects still lack of a more assertive relationship with the child and the childhood. (shrink)