O direito da criança ao respeito, à participação e à liberdade em discursos de professores/as

Abstract

This paper is part of a collective research project of the Contemporary Infancy and Youth Group (GEIJC, in Portuguese), at the Federal University of Mato Grosso (UFMT), municipality of Rondonópolis campus, which has researched, among other topics, discourses on children’s and adolescents’ Rights. It aims at describing and interpreting public elementary school teachers’ discourses about their understanding of and how they deal with children’s and adolescents’ rights towards respect, freedom and participation during their classes. The Profound Hermeneutics method (PH) proposed by Thompson (2007), which is made up with three phases (socio-historical content analysis, formal or discursive analysis, and [re]interpretation), was at use. Thus, the contextualization of the law over children’s rights timeline was followed, from (inter)national debates, leading to Geneva Declaration (1924), Declaration of the Rights of the Children (1959), Federal Constitution (Brazil, 1988), International Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), and the Child and Adolescent Statute (ECA, in Portuguese, 1990). One of the theoretical backgrounds that inspired this paper is by Janusz Korczak (1878-1942), who expressed his understand on children’s rights as well as his view against children’s role in a world of grownups. Besides Korczak, it is based on social studies on infancy by Qvortrup (2010), Pinto and Sarmento (1997), Corsaro (2011), Soares (1997), among others. Three public school teachers were interviewed and the data collected show that they relate right to respect, participation and freedom that children have regarding the learning process and that, although there is such acknowledgment of the importance of respecting children’s rights, seeing and feeling such right at schools is still something incipient.