Time and childhood interwoven in the school routine

Abstract

This article focuses on time for children in a full time preschool. Theoretically, this paper drawns on the reflections about time in Bergson, Kohan, Prigogine, and Stengers; about childhood in Kohan and Larrosa; about school time in Barbosa and Sanches; and about other possibilities to experience times in school as seen in Gallo and Lins. In order to find out how thechildren involved in our research read the time, we talked to them using the book “Armando e o Tempo” (Armando and the Time) by Mônica Guttmann, from which they made a drawing. We then used the clues in and from the drawings referring to the Evidential Paradigm by Carlo Ginzburg. We were able to decipher that the two times - chronological and aeonic - were presentin their everyday life: the chronological time was represented by the clock, and the aeonic one, by the imagination. Thus, we can think of schools as having other childhoods and other times, and conceive of childhoodbeyond chronology and also recognize it in the dimension of the experience, in the intensity of its duration, including the possibility to experience the Aeon time.

Key words: time, childhood, school.