O brincar como possibilidade para o desenvolvimento integral da criança na educação infantil.

Abstract

This study deals with playing as a possibility for integral development of the child in early childhood education. The objectives of this research focus on apprehending and analyzing the conception of play by monitors of public day-care centers of Pombal city - PB, in a specific way, to understand how the monitors associate the play to integral development of the children; to investigate how the educators develop the playful practices in the daily life of their work and to verify how the monitors experienced playing in teacher education. In order to base this research, we used as a theoretical ground contributions of the following authors: Sampaio (2012), Kishimoto (2011), Angotti (2010), Vygotsky (1984), among others that discuss this theme, was also used the Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais para a Educação Infantil (National Curricular Guidelines for the Early Childhood Education) (BRASIL, 2010), and the Referencial Curricular Nacional da Educação Infantil (National Curriculum Framework for Early Childhood Education) (BRASIL, 1998). A total of 20 monitors from public, municipal day care centers in the city of Pombal-PB participated in the study. The methodological procedure used in this work was a bibliographical and field research. We applied a sociodemographic questionnaire to know the profile of the participants of the research, the Free Word Association Test (FWAT) and a semistructured interview, composed of seven questions. We analyze the data through content analysis. Through the FWAT and the interviews with the monitors we could understand that playing contributes significantly to integral development of children, since it allows kids to socialize, use their creativity, imagination, acuminate their critical sense, to exercise their citizenship, in addition to facilitating the daily work of educators. It is also important to emphasize that these monitors still summarize the play as an important pedagogical instrument to teach contents, or as a form of fun, pastime, thus, we perceive the need to broaden the discussion and the studies on the theme in the teacher education, so that professionals who work in Early Childhood Education may understand better their diverse contributions to life and integral development of the child.