A produção acadêmica sobre educação literária na educação infantil : um estudo bibliográfico

Abstract

In the current context of Brazilian Preschool Education, literary education presents itself as a challenge to professionals who wish to foster the taste for reading among children, even before the conventional use of reading and writing. This work discusses the following question: How does the academic knowledge frame the literary initiation/education in Early Childhood Education? The aim of this dissertation is to map works in the field of Education focusing on the development of literary readers in kindergarten, and thereby synthesising their main contributions to the pedagogical area regarding literary reading at this level of education. The theoretical references that allowed us to recompose the main studies on the theme were: Zilberman (1991; 1981; 2003; 2012), Bettelheim (1996; 2007), Lajolo (2001), Michèle Petit (2008), Graça Paulino and Rildo Cosson (2009). The project was carried out by means of a bibliographical research of the current state of knowledge. Ten theses were selected, written between 2009 and 2019, in post-graduate programmes in Education. The contents of those theses were recomposed based on the following categories: the role of the teacher in the literary education process, the criteria that children use when choosing a book, the books that are considered adequate for literary education in Infant Education and the elements to be worked on so that the development of the literary reader arises. It was concluded that there are two ways of approaching the teacher's role in relation to literary education: as a reading mediator and as a reader/narrator. The criteria used by children to choose a book, as determined by the material in the corpus, are: graphic resources, illustrations, size, relation between the visual and verbal texts (verisimilitude), literariness, appealing and clear images and colours, humour, games, imagination and joy. Meanwhile, teachers consider it essential that the book observes the following aspects: analysis of the content, i.e., check if the text and illustrations have quality; different formats and different textual genres are available; the cover; representation of feelings, values, emotion, expression, fantasy, movement; a story rich in details, with fictional elements, but with verisimilitude and with poetic language. For the literary development to happen, it is necessary to offer an environment rich in storytelling, narratives, mediations (exploring voice intonation, bringing rhythm to the children's ears, relating image to written text), exploration and handling of the works (assiduous contact leading to an intimate bond with this object), literary conversations and raising of hypotheses after the narrative. The conclusion is that the teacher who takes on the role of a mediator or a reader/narrator needs to be fully enthusiastic and be concerned, daily, with offering different methodologies for reading and exploring literary texts, as well as dealing with the different aspects around this process, including the child, the book, and the teaching proposal. It was found out that literature, in kindergarten, is an essential and transforming goal that enables children to experience different feelings and to know different worlds, full of imagination and fantasy, closely connected to the child's own way of understanding the world.