ABSTRACT

This article aims to approach the broad theme of childhood, social movements and the urban environment and its relationship with teacher training processes and the relationship with school curricula, which often disregard what is around schools , from daycare centers, and other forms of political and social organization, as fundamental elements to be developed in a sensitive and in-depth manner in all educational segments: childhood, poverty, indigenous and street populations, urban life, participatory processes, heritage and the city , are themes that are related to the production of the lives of all people, from babies onwards, who also invent and produce cities. There is no intention to present the state of the art or knowledge, but only to touch on important issues and produce thoughts about them. In the end, we seek to guide the display of articles contained in this dossier and that address the topic, offering contributions to the continuity of the debates started here.

Keywords:
Education; Childhood; Urban; Social Movements; Populations

RESUMO

Este artigo tem como objetivo aproximar-se do tema amplo infância, movimentos sociais e o urbano e sua relação com processos de formação de professores e professoras e a relação com currículos escolares, os quais, muitas vezes, desconsideram o que há em torno das escolas, desde a creche, e demais formas de organização política e social, como elementos fundamentais a serem desenvolvidos de modo sensível e aprofundado em todos os segmentos educacionais: infância, pobreza, populações indígenas e de rua, vida urbana, processos participativos, patrimônio e cidade, são temáticas que se relacionam na produção da vida de todas as pessoas, desde bebês, que também inventam e produzem as cidades. Não há qualquer intenção de realizar a apresentação do estado da arte ou do conhecimento, mas apenas de tocar em questões importantes e produzir pensamentos sobre elas. Ao final, buscamos orientar a mostra de artigos contidos neste dossiê e que abordam o tema oferecendo contribuições para a continuidade dos debates aqui iniciados.

Palavras-chave:
Educação; Infância; Urbano; Movimentos Sociais; Populações

Introduction

Reflecting on childhood(s) here and there is the guiding thread of this article whose purpose goes beyond the desire to articulate themes that involve the preparation of the dossier “Childhood(s), social movements and the city: curriculum(s) and teacher training”. From now on, we aim to create a fabric that internally weaves together the subjects discussed and proposes dialogues with what else may come, as well as supporting such broad and necessary subjects for the social studies of childhood in intersection with education and urban studies, in its broadest sense and from the different points of view present in the dossier that is now open to public reading.

In an introductory way, we seek to develop this text based on a very comprehensive reflection, apparently distant from the theme developed in this magazine, but which is important to focus on: “compassion fatigue”. It is related to the theme of this dossier, produced from the confluence between broad themes, such as childhood, social movements and cities, seeking relationships with the curriculum and training of Basic Education teachers. Because they are broad, they require accurate understanding and, why not, a certain exercise in self-analysis. But why do we focus here on compassion fatigue, as called by Salem Nasser (2023NASSER, Salem. Eles morreram com fome! Selective Blindness, 2023. https://salemhnasser.substack.com/p/eles-morreram-com-fome?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
https://salemhnasser.substack.com/p/eles... )? Where are the immense bonfires that burn without us seeing (in fact, we don’t see?)? What use do the reflections presented by the authors serve us? Wouldn’t we be so far removed from the events and stories of childhood and the lives and deaths of children “there”? Aren’t the themes in this dossier focused on realities far removed from what has been happening on other continents? After all, shouldn’t we distance ourselves and reflect only on issues directly related to us and the country where we live? Some time ago, the expression “each in its own right” was frequently heard to refer to individual acts that aim for particular solutions to political, social, economic and personal issues that trouble us. Implied in these statements, there is a strong presence of the individualistic understanding of life, which separates us more than it unites us, giving us an understanding of the capitalist economy of violence that is perpetuated throughout our daily lives and across the most diverse territories. And the kids? They are not apart from this. Are they silent? Not always. We would say almost never. Sensitive eyes and attentive listening are capable of registering its manifestations that occur in different ways. We have to see and feel with our whole body and politically choose which side to be on. This dossier was proposed in order to place them alongside them in an explicit choice of who to side with and who to follow.

The relationship made by Salem Nasser (2023NASSER, Salem. Eles morreram com fome! Selective Blindness, 2023. https://salemhnasser.substack.com/p/eles-morreram-com-fome?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
https://salemhnasser.substack.com/p/eles... ), the author referenced in the epigraph, takes us directly, as is easy to assume, to the war between Israel and Palestine, which led to the death of almost ten thousand Palestinian children¹ 1 Since this is not the subject of this article, we will not problematize the issue of Palestine and Israel, however, it certainly adds to the tens of thousands of children, many other people and their families, victims of the restriction made by Israel on the entry of medicines into Gaza, which imposes obstacles to the Palestinian pharmaceutical industry leading to more deaths and practically lifeless bodies. For more information, visit: “Palestine: apartheid is also pharmaceutical”, available at: (Choo-Kang, 2024). We ask ourselves: “where are we?” . Tragedy narrated mostly from just one point of view and which produces narratives that lead us to be unaware of the plurality of populations. It is a practice that spans generations pursuing and building a certain way of preserving some at the expense of others, sometimes without leaving a trace.

Referring to Palestine, Edward Said (2011SAID, Edward. A questão Palestina. São Paulo: UNESP, 2011.) stated that a tragedy has existed for decades that exposes the denial and, in a certain way, the invisibilization of a people. We were inspired by his thoughts on the erasure of Palestinian narratives, to reflect on the gradual supplantation and silencing made in relation to childhoods, which, as has been discussed and investigated for so long, are not universal. Such narratives that matter are reduced to caricatural representations of various peoples that are transmitted to us in the most different ways. There seems to be a lack of ears that listen (Said, 2011). We will say that there seems to be a lack of active listening that results in good propositions in the face of the events that historically affect us.

As already debated in the theoretical fields of childhood studies, it is about considering children. After all, what are your views and proposals for what is happening? Around the world, we have stories made up of people of all ages and thousands of children whose lives seem to matter more when taken away. What is happening presents itself as a symptom of much larger problems, whose economic, but also cultural, relationships overlap with any others and that is why we chose to raise this issue at the beginning of this article. We understand that in this debate, countless tracks are produced that are present in different regions of the world, where people move, walking in the face of a present without a future. It’s not going away. We have before our eyes - if they are not the result of selective blindness as Salem Nasser stated - a case of colonialism in the 21st century. We infer that what is happening is one of the many laboratories of the aforementioned “who can die, who can live” that allow us to deduce who are the people capable of mourning, as Judith Butler (2015BUTLER, Judite. Quadros de Guerra. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2015.) would say.

We add to this reflection by Butler another, made by Mike Davis (1997DAVIS, Mike. Planeta Favela. São Paulo: Boitempo, 1997.), in which he affirms in a very forceful way the existence of a surplus humanity, a product of capitalism that discards lives and people and, as is easy to see, children, after all, we need a present with no future for them. After all, what good are so many people in the world? We have reached a time when planned obsolescence has reached some groups of human beings. Regarding this discard, and as a way of justifying it, all sorts of thoughts are created, including burlesques, and other practices that aim to answer why they cannot continue to live. With some arguments, they continue to take lives of those who are perceived as threats. As in the fictional work Luminous Republic, by Andrès Barba (2017BARBA, Andrès. República luminosa. São Paulo: Todavia, 2017.), children’s way of speaking, behaving, gestures and ways of organizing themselves into groups sound strange, and even rejectable, to adults. In fiction, the author creates scenes of repulsion and fear at what is exposed by children’s organizations. The strange that frightens is anchored in the incomprehensible social practices of children. Is it only in fiction that children’s organizations are seen as worrying or an object of disqualification?

It is not our objective to specifically address one of the many wars that have taken over and produced our daily lives, sometimes more, sometimes less visible. However, it is worth highlighting that, in this scenario, full of contrasts, in which riches grow at the expense of misery, collective movements and actions also emerge that seek to face such problems, at the intersection with educational problems, which urgently needs to be discussed when the subject is teacher training, curricular bases for all stages of education, from early childhood education and daycare.

If one of the broad definitions of the word symptom refers to the subjective phenomenon of pain or discomfort that demands its end, the wars in which we live, unlike the end, seem to fight for permanence, which indirectly produces an individual fatigue that becomes collective generated from the delirium of capital and its inspiring garments of a spiral of endless inequalities, violence and aggression that go beyond the physical body. Although geographically distant, this has profound relationships with what affects us in Brazil, as it involves thinking about where children are from the time they are babies, not just in academic research, but in the different places where they live and which are also produced by them on a daily basis. Are we fatigued?

This question resonates with us with every written word and in the face of urban landscapes, which are sometimes so precarious. It seems to us that there is a selection of events, in which a certain general forgetfulness of what we saw predominates. A state of apathy is created from which one emerges sporadically and returns as soon as possible. Concomitantly with apathy, we claim that we resist and we have many actions that in fact expose resistance, such as the group concentrated in the east zone of São Paulo, called “Mothers in Struggle”, whose questioning focuses on the State that kills children and youth populations, mostly black, on the outskirts of large cities. “They took everything from us, but we still have the breath to fight” (Gonçalves et al., 2022GONÇALVES, Gilvania Reis; RIBEIRO, Maria Medina; SILVA, Mirian Damasceno da; SOUZA, Rossana Martins de; SOUZA, Sidneia Santos; ANTONIO, Solange de Oliveira; SILVA, Tatiana Lima. Mães em luta. São Paulo: Mães em Luto/ZL; Fábrica de Cânones, 2022.). When debating children’s right to the city² 2 Children and the right to the city, a broad and important topic, has been addressed in other of our productions written by various authors, including: “The right of children to the city: perspectives from Brazil and Portugal” (Gobbi; Anjos; Seixas; Tomás, 2022), “Children, education and the right to the city: research and practices” (Gobbi; Anjos; Leite, 2021) and “Perspectives for thinking about cities: childhoods, education, democracy and justice” (Gobbi; Anjos, 2020). , one of the mottos of this dossier, we cannot exempt ourselves from reflecting on the extermination experiment in which we live and how much this has been intensifying. There is ethnic cleansing, there is cleaning carried out in the streets, in the favelas, in areas completely abandoned, and children and women³ 3 To continue reflections, it is recommended to read the following written productions: “Necropolitics and black children: essays in the pandemic” (Souza; Anjos; Correa, 2022); “Collectives, women and children in 5 movements: in the pandemic, from the podcast to the book” (Gobbi; Pito, 2021) and “Effects of the pandemic and the increase in inequalities in children’s lives: dialogues on violence and indifference (Finco; Souza; Anjos, 2021). are not exempt from this.

Although we are living in Brazil, in a political period in which we intend to continue the construction of democracy, the writing of this text is still taking place at a time of social polarization and the presence of degrading social inequalities in which conquered social rights are vilified. We cannot close our eyes to the narrowing of labor rights, remain silent in the face of the weakening of unions as an expression of struggle and achievement of workers’ rights - uberization is an excellent example - and a fierce privatization process which do not exclude national public education in all its stages. These actions affect children’s lives directly and indirectly, and even more so when we seek to understand them in an intersectional way. We understand the different experiences of oppression that exist aimed at the black population, women, indigenous peoples, poor populations, concentrated on the outskirts of large cities, and children who live and develop their childhoods and relationships within these groups, on which increasingly updated strategies of criminalization, punishment, extortion and expropriation are predominant. We must reflect and continue to produce investigations that show us, from different angles, possible answers to these realities that disrupt our daily lives, including at school, from daycare onwards.

In everyday political practices, we ask: is there resistance? And if so, how do we resist? Borrowing a reflection from Byung-Chul Han (2023HAN, Byung-Chul. Capitalismo e impulso de morte: ensaios e entrevistas. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2023.), it is possible to state that, although we see consistent and punctual actions and call them resistance, there is a process of seduction in which we no longer find a good opponent defined. This paralyzes us and molds us all into an entrepreneurial mindset of ourselves, which produces a certain meaning and belief in a supposed freedom. The freedom felt makes protests difficult and generates aggression against the person themselves. A giant nebula obliterates our looks and thoughts and forges, among other things, the creation of objectionable denominations of oppression and exploitation. For example, the adjective “warriors”, as many women are called due to their sisterhood and resilience in the face of the challenges of an unequally produced life, can be confused as it is often devoid of its political meaning. This qualification leads to the identification of resistance in which it is also urgent to understand the reproduction of capital and its workers, from the kitchen, as investigated by Silvia Federici (2019FEDERICI, Silvia. O Ponto Zero da Revolução: trabalho doméstico, reprodução e luta feminista. São Paulo: Elefante, 2019.). The fact is that women prostrate themselves exhausted within a daily routine programmed to invalidate the desire and practice of change in which concerns for the urgent predominate. Being in a hurry, being “on the run” are significant expressions. Routinely used, they evoke and show the reproduction of a daily life of overloads and extortions of life itself. Children, especially girls, are not isolated from this rush, on the contrary, depending on their living conditions, they can reproduce it. The house, in addition to being a space of comfort for some people, as so often stated, associated with domestic routines, constitutes a laboratory of practices that produce, reveal and reinforce economic dependencies in debts incurred with food, rent, medicines, transport, education (Cavallero; Gago, 2022CAVALLERO, Luci; GAGO, Verônica. La casa como laboratorio: finanzas, vivenda y trabajo esencial. Buenos Aires: Tinta Lemón, 2022.). The adult universe, mostly male, and the maintenance of society’s management are at stake. The patriarchal system adds to the adult-centeredness by producing silencing of childhood, or part of it, in order to make them acquiesce in the face of practices and continue silently, having denied the understanding of their ability to produce thoughts and history. It is urgent that we extend this reflection when the subject is children and curricular issues, pedagogical and didactic practices in which, sometimes, their lives are unknown, or considered outside the school, as if we could divide lives inside and outside the school environment, with families and daycare centers or other educational institutions, leaving such matters out of training processes.

Considering the home and the practices engendered in them as a reproductive space for capital and patriarchy, Susan Ferguson (2023FERGUSON, Susan. Crianças, infância e capitalismo: uma perspectiva da reprodução social. In: BATTACHARYA, Tithi (Org.). Teoria da reprodução social: remapear a classe, recentralizar a opressão. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2023. p. 181-209.) related this reflection to children, stating that they are directly linked to the processes of appropriation and expropriation. When considering the theory of social reproduction from a feminist perspective, the author reflects on the different forms of child labor which, according to her, is the object of the feminized, gendered and racialized labor of other people. These relations of oppression and exploitation has repercussions on the ways in which children and childhoods are produced and reproduced and how their forms of participation and agency occur, at the same time that they lead to questioning the development of community, open and integrated childhoods (Ferguson, 2023, p.183). Such questions focus on the problematization of a society whose conflicts are also anchored in an adult-centered perspective that inhibits the effective presence of children, from babies, as participants and agents in different social processes, in which acts that can be considered revolutionary in nature can and do pass for children too, seeing them as political subjects, included in the struggles for new forms of society.

Considering that childhood is not just a phase, but a modality of life, leads us to believe that there is a revolutionary force that inhabits children, as well as adults. It is also to counter representational forms produced by adults that disqualify opinions and decisions when coming from children. We cannot forget that this is not something deterministic, we refute the idea of children as repositories of knowledge, as has been discussed for so long. There are subjectivities being constructed that escape - and acquiesce - to the aegis of this model of control, at the same time that they participate in their own transformations as subjects who do not subject themselves at all times. Understanding children and social inequalities requires understanding how their bodies and minds experience and unfold against the relentless impulses of capital and constructed relationships (Ferguson, 2023FERGUSON, Susan. Crianças, infância e capitalismo: uma perspectiva da reprodução social. In: BATTACHARYA, Tithi (Org.). Teoria da reprodução social: remapear a classe, recentralizar a opressão. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2023. p. 181-209., p. 185). Children find themselves in deep engagement and constant negotiations that simultaneously involve playful and transformative aspects with the world, especially when we understand play as imaginative and creative expressions that forge gaps and experience other relationships in everyday life, changing their patterns, even if only slightly. We must recognize and learn from this playful aspect, which exists in people, but has a huge presence in children. Time and space in childhood are separated from the direct domination of work by capital, thus acting as a brake on unreasonable reproduction, even if in a slight way.

When consulting recent studies on childhood and highlighting the production of social studies of childhood, including Childhood Sociology and Child Anthropology, we observe that investigations have recently taken shape whose concerns are aimed at children in different contexts and conditions of life production that do not just the school one. We believe that this is the reverberation of a turning point in which researchers began to focus on children present among the homeless population in large cities, those who, since they were babies, directly or indirectly, participate in processes and movements social struggles for housing, others that demand broad rights to enjoy the cities where they live and which are also produced by them. The relationship made inside and outside school environments, including daycare, has become an issue to be faced, as the production of territories where they leave their marks and productions has gained body and content whose understanding we need to build.

As Ailton Krenak (2023KRENAK, Ailton. Futuro ancestral. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2023.) would say, this world that is ending is better to end. But the question to keep thinking about is: what are we projecting for the very near future? It seems to us that the existence of a present without a future is reaffirmed every day. Inspired and inspired by the thought of activist researcher Geneviève Azam (2020AZAM, Geneviève. Carta à Terra. São Paulo: Relicário, 2020.), we affirm the finitude of the world that is created through countless crimes of ecocide committed by people who still believe that they can “transform, without any harm, the Earth at their disposal, organized and calm” (Azam, 2020, p. 19). It is from this world where we write about childhoods, faced with the finiteness of the world that is ending. And they? They, as Krenak (2023) stated, are bearers of good news.

How much good news does the urban make with children today?

As a proposal for first reflection, we suggest that, when trying to focus on the broad theme “childhood and city”, one of the subjects present in the dossier “Childhood(s), social movements and city: curriculum(s) and teacher training”, or on the topic “children in the city”, a first question to be asked is: what do we understand by children and how is our understanding present in the production of urban spaces?

We wonder if there are urban policies whose bill effectively includes the presence of children. What is the conception that is anchored behind the articulations made? Depending on this, we can only understand projects that are mostly designed for them and not with them, although we have fundamental references that indicate paths to be followed together, such as those proposed by Mayumi de Souza Lima, in Brazil, and Jane Jacobs, in the United States, which already in the 1950s produced thoughts about the use of public spaces by children, whether on the way back from school or in games to be played together on the sidewalks, sometimes disregarded and little used as a space for people to do something common in possible encounters.

A quick passage just to touch briefly on the conception that brings us closer to children as agents and, therefore, those who can be thought of as also holding the right to the city, not just to enjoy it, based on what was designed for them (the which is rare, as cities are not for people and even less so for young children), but thinking about them, what can be done from within the school, why not? Although already extensively researched, this is an extremely relevant point, as it involves observing them as holders of voices, whose speeches and other expressive manifestations can greatly contribute to the production of inclusive and egalitarian practices.

In this way, the questions “what does it mean to be a child?” and “what conceptions do we carry about it?” they gain a very large multiplicity of meanings and advance to the understanding that one is a child in different ways. There are differences when you are black, black and poor, black, poor and a girl, European and Brazilian or Latin American, migrant, older or younger, indigenous, homeless or homeless, among other possibilities of building childhood and being child in the city. These forms differ in each of the neighborhoods and cities in which they live. At the same time, issues that could be seen as regional spread and gain enormous relevance, allowing us to answer questions about them, sometimes in the singular, sometimes in the plural.

So, from our point of view, to discuss childhood and the city in dialogue with education, although it may seem obvious, it is essential to reflect on which conceptions guide our city projects and, even more so, which ones provide support for us to think about society and society projects. which are ongoing. After all, when we open the newspapers, or access web pages and our social networks, we frequently see cases of violence and, less and less rarely, cases of violence against children, at home or on the streets. And we need to talk about this when we have children and cities on the agenda. After all, what society is hidden, or explicit, when we have daily deaths that affect the childhood that feeds it? Where does life hide and what has it produced?

Affirming children as subjects who produce cities comes from concepts originating, as already mentioned, from the social studies of childhood and which much more recently meet with urban studies in a rich and complex production of meanings. In this first large group, we find, just to underline, the idea of children whose voices and entire bodies can be heard and seen and whose productions, in daycare centers, on the streets, in squares, in schools, in their homes, whatever they may be, They are fundamental for us to think about the cities where they live and which are also produced by them.

Francesco Tonucci (2019TONUCCI, Francesco. A cidade das crianças. Portugal: Kalandraka, 2019.) stated decades ago that a city that is good for children is good for all the people who live there and, therefore, we have to think about what is good for them. In this way, what we have is a political perception of the presence of children as co-participants in decision-making processes taken on a large scale. After all, what do children think about their lives, what would they like to present as proposals for another city and society project? Reflecting on this, thinking about all of them, requires us to practice constant observation, listening and consideration of this other. What is behind a city that excludes, among many others, also children, or part of them? It is essential that we draw attention to a production that segregates and separates certain groups of children, or even social groups to which they belong. The city that is not for children can be seen in a racialized, gendered, age-segregated way, since the adult-centered perspective, in which the hierarchy of relationships by age is present, is found in architectural projects, in the production of cities themselves and in everyday social practices. Younger people (not to mention that the time of elderly people in large urban centers does not fit) do not have the time to enjoy it, they hinder the development of capital in its overwhelming, aggressive and unfair acceleration that produces it in an unequal way, creating streets where only fast passage is tolerated, if that.

To say the least, a very negative image has been built about the street, as a place of danger and which should not be used as a place to stop. They are configured, most of the time, as passages and in a light manner. Stopping can be seen as a threat to urban order, a threat to those who observe it slowly. Luis Antônio Simas (2019SIMAS, Luis Antonio. O corpo encantado das ruas. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2019.) draws our attention to the use of streets: if we admit that the meeting place is squares or parks, we are only neglecting the streets and relegating the space of disenchantment to them. This is an important reflection when we bring it closer to our concerns with children and their ways of using urban space.

When we think about childhood in movement and social movements, we face the creative and political challenge of including them, not just as another person, or group, participating in present bodies, but as active and present co-participants in processes of struggle for achievement and maintenance of rights. Housing, education, a significant school curriculum for their training processes, health, affection and care constitute rights that are sometimes found far from their lives. Do we consider children’s opinions? When listening to them, what is produced from listening that, in fact, changes the state of things? We return to the question: how much good news does the urban make with children?

Social movements and childhood: amplifying existing sounds and practices

Recently, who and where are the activists active on the public scene? Does it matter to think about them? Are there new configurations in global movements, left and right, that require other approaches? These questions were asked by Maria da Glória Gohn (2022GOHN, Maria da Gloria. Ativismos no Brasil: movimentos sociais, coletivos e organizações sociais civis. Como impactam e por que importam? Petrópolis: Vozes, 2022.), focusing on a certain reordering of social movements in the country’s recent history. The author goes deeper and, in doing so, makes us think about the differences between activism and social movements and the confluences of their demands and actions. Are they configured as we learned to define them some time ago or can we give them the name collective actions due to the more ephemeral nature of the acts carried out? We thicken this broth of important questions by continuing with the reflections that begin this article and which aim to relate childhood, cities and social movements to education. Historically disqualified and rarely seen as potential actors in political scenes, we have learned to be surprised by the presence of children in debates on subjects considered to naturally belong to the adult universe. It ends up keeping them, in some aspects, distant from decision making processes or collective actions that involve children in the urban environment and that start from them to understand the urban environment beyond research, conquering political formats and political presence and participation with children.

Studies concerned with the participatory processes of children within social movements are recent: are they “in between”, mixing with people and adult demands, or do they constitute the movements themselves, being listened to and considered in their rights and demands? Now, if they are understood as social agents or actors, there is nothing more common than extending this understanding to social movements and the decision-making paths that constitute them. When they have a voice, why not involve them in public and political decisions? This involvement would lead to intergenerational questions and, perhaps, adjustments that would contribute to non-hierarchical configurations.

In the 1980s, movements for children’s rights were created with relevance in Argentina and other parts of the world. Distancing themselves from liberal discourses, they promoted the rapprochement of union references with a view to social equality and a dignified childhood in inseparable ways. In Argentina, the Movimiento Nacional Chicos del Pueblo (MNCP), in this decade, joined the labor movement coining the expression “with tenderness we will win” highlighting the presence of children and their rights as flags raised alongside workers and their emergencies. In addition to the fight for a “dignified childhood”, it was a term widely used as a way of referring to the guarantees of material conditions, as well as seeking freedom to participate in political decision-making processes over their lives. Dignified childhood became the flag, which, broadly speaking, held several struggles combined with others linked to the union agenda and which would be taken up nationally (Shabel, 2019SHABEL, Paola. “Con ternura venceremos”. Organizaciones sociales en lucha por la infancia digna (1983 - 2015). In: MORALES, Santiago; MAGISTRIS, Gabriela. Niñez em movimento. Buenos Aires: Chirimbota, 2019. p. 79-105).

An important aspect to highlight was the consideration and inclusion of children from the homeless population. It was argued that there were no “children of the street”, but rather children of the people, therefore, of the entire Argentine and global population, which should be considered in the development of public policies. In the first decades of the 2000s, discussions about the precariousness of children’s lives gained greater popular expression linked to the labor movements. Workers considered the participation of children and demanded that they be heard. “The kids are part of the class and have to be fighting with the class” (Giuliani, 2019 apudShabel, 2019SHABEL, Paola. “Con ternura venceremos”. Organizaciones sociales en lucha por la infancia digna (1983 - 2015). In: MORALES, Santiago; MAGISTRIS, Gabriela. Niñez em movimento. Buenos Aires: Chirimbota, 2019. p. 79-105, p. 95). There is an undeniable understanding of the inseparability between class struggle and the struggle with children that can serve as an example for recovering the history of children’s participatory processes in social movements. Similar to the Cirandas Infantiles practiced by the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil, walking spaces were created for children during moments of marches for rights. Unfortunately, with the worldwide advance of neoliberalism, particularly in the countries of the Global South, such movements have increased. Hit, the movements weakened and with them some of the rights they had won. Precarious work, recently called entrepreneurship, done by oneself, has become the focus when it comes to rights. Among other things, this deprives the meaning of a history of struggles, advances and political achievements. It is important to reaffirm that this has a strong impact on childhood, whose children have literally become the target of extermination practices, mostly black, indigenous, poor children, residents of urban outskirts, where they find themselves under the aegis of capitalism in their ways of governing from which few escape.

Although we have in our history collective actions, such as the “Painted Diapers” movement, which put babies on the streets in a motorcade with their strollers in the fight for the inclusion of daycare centers in the Fund for the Maintenance and Development of Basic Education and Valorization of Education Professionals (FUNDEB), bringing people together, without forgetting babies, gave greater visibility to the actions, as well as educating people to understand the importance of the participation of children at such a young age. At a time increasingly hostile to different social groups and public manifestations of demands in the spaces of disputes and in dispute, it is worth revisiting, even if so briefly, some movements, sometimes more, sometimes less ephemeral, but which undoubtedly constitute aspects of the history of a childhood in movement - considering the presence of adults and adults with them - on which it is urgent to produce thoughts and future studies. It is essential that we recover aspects of the memory of a not so distant past regarding children, not only in Brazil, and the struggles fought by them, in different ways and conditions.

If we need to remember so as not to forget, it is worth highlighting the historical period and political conditions in which we wrote this article. It is being prepared in January 2024, when exactly one year ago the forces of the Brazilian extreme right took over the Palácio do Planalto in Brasília, exposing political projects that had been articulated for a longer time. We can understand this explosion/invasion as an act of extreme violence and as a manifestation of hatred, which it certainly is. However, there is something else that haunts us and could keep us up at night: it presents Brazil as a possible laboratory for far-right atrocities in the world. The organicity of such right-wing groups shows us their faces practiced in order to usurp rights already conquered and to promote governments whose way of governing is close to that of a mere manager of order (Safatle, 2023), which should worry us. We can initially ask about the relationship between this extremely relevant political fact, which extends beyond a date that must be remembered and criticized, namely January 8, 2023, and the childhoods that all the articles gathered here focused on.

We believe that discussing the extreme right and their actions is fundamental, as their ways of thinking and acting imply the production of childhoods where their rights are vilified across a wide range, from the right to play, to housing, to education from daycare, to respect, friendships, the act of coming and going through the streets of their own cities, family, whatever composition. The confrontation we must make begins with the act of thinking about the childhoods forged in this generation. We wrote lines before about segregation, children as targets in different peripheral communities, rejection of poverty, racialization, gendering, ageization of the city that take place in a mixed way, under our eyes, producing a fragmented spatialization in which, sometimes, we are left with just the encounter with the equal, without the proper perception and relationships with what is not us. There is, therefore, it seems to us, an indifference to life, which is included in each of these acts and, to a certain extent, to the learned silencing that is circumvented in cracks dug into the daily life produced and lived. Perhaps, in digging through cracks and fissures we will find the good news...

The articles and some of their ideas: no spoiler, but to carry out the invitation to read and debate

Why write if the text does not have the effect of awakening the world? Salem Nasser’s (2023NASSER, Salem. Eles morreram com fome! Selective Blindness, 2023. https://salemhnasser.substack.com/p/eles-morreram-com-fome?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
https://salemhnasser.substack.com/p/eles... ) question, in the opening epigraph of this article, does not refer to awakening as a way of giving birth to those who supposedly do not have it, bringing people closer to a single thought, to convictions devoid of critical or creative examinations. On the contrary, it is about awakening in order to touch upon certain events seen and experienced in the historical present in which we find ourselves, in which it is urgent not only to reflect on it, but also to take positions in relation to the hardships seen and experienced, now more, less so for a large part of the world’s population, especially indigenous peoples, black people, trans people, women, the poor, migrants and children. Inspired and inspired by Agamben, we ask if, in front of the house that burns, we are not “zealously covering it with white plaster and lying words that seem intact [...] people pretend to live there and go out through the streets masked among the ruins, like if they were still the familiar neighborhoods of yesteryear” (Agamben, 2021, p. 13). Do we pretend not to see something? Pretending leads to a certain “letting go of life”, without the necessary commitment to the present that becomes without a future, or whose future becomes cloudy, obstructing our understanding.

In this article, by opting for an introductory approach to themes that are both challenging and important, we know that we have only touched lightly without the due depth with which they require treatment. This choice was made with the aim of stimulating future debates and deepening those already held in the present. Obviously, we do not understand that an article can save the world by making structural changes that we so desperately need. Changing the current state of things requires thinking a lot, taking positions and exposing them, but we believe that writing is also the record of some form of protest. This is done with words, reflections, production of thoughts. In this way, a dossier is proposed whose theme follows this purpose by making public some of the research that has been carried out problematizing this theme.

In the process of organizing this dossier, whose broad theme is childhood, social movements and cities in relation to curricula and teacher training, we sought to bring together articles by proximity of approaches and we did so based on thematic units arranged as follows: 1. Childhood( s): rights and participation; Child participation and rights; 2. Social movements: there is a particular strength among children; 3. Children and/on the streets, indigenous children, territorial disputes, curriculum and training of teachers. That Division into subthemes in no way separates the texts and their ideas. Contrary to this, there is an organic relationship promoting dialogues between them.

1. Childhood(s): rights and participation

Currently, it would be somewhat trivial to say that we have expanded studies on child participation by producing research that identifies the presence or absence of children in different spaces, whether public or private, with their different ways of participating. Most of the research is focused on studies within the school and possible participation in the school space. Investigations related to the understanding of student unions and assemblies, student councils, from a very young age, have greatly contributed to the advancement of research whose broad concern focuses on the affirmation of children as agents, historical subjects and rights. Sometimes they are approached with more or less explicit political connotations, sometimes they are understood as active actors/participants within the adult universe, historically understood as naturally destined for practices of a political nature. From an adult-centered and ageist perspective, adults, especially men, “were born for the most visible participatory practices”. However, what was produced on the topic gained better contours and began to involve different expressions of participation in other contexts and conditions and in different countries. The articles under the subtheme “child participation and rights” help us to observe poverty and discrimination from the perspective of children, putting them in perspective and considering their points of view on a topic that is not always valued and investigated and that approaches the big theme of social inequalities, with emphasis on the article by Catarina Tomás and Carolina Gonçalves entitled The world in our eyes and through our voices: what children say about rights ,discrimination and differences, gender and poverty.

Based on active listening to children, the author analyzes their conceptions about rights, discrimination and differences, gender and poverty through interviews and focus groups.

Ana Sofia Silva, Cidália Ferreira Silva e Natália Fernandes, in the article Child participation in public space: proposals for Thinking about the child’s right to territory presents an interesting question, namely, in recent research there is a certain interdisciplinary dialogue that considers the childhood category with its own value. However, when talking about child participation, we see the concept of city used without the necessary theoretical support that is appropriate for research. The author, who has the Sociology of Childhood as a fundamental reference for her analyses, faces the challenge of understanding the use of the term “territory” as more conducive to the city. In Chile, Mónica Alejandra Peña Ochoa seeks to focus on the presence of children as fundamental to social mobilizations in her country. Political subjectivities, the role of school and its conflicts that combine childhood and women were considered in her article Children as political actors at school: a case of participation and conflict in the context of drafting Chile’s new constitution.

With the study on children and the city, we finalize this set of texts by presenting the article Research on childhood, children and the city in Education: trends and challenges, by Lutiane Novakowski. e Fabiana de Amorim Marcello. Without the intention of covering all studies on the broad topic of children, city and education, the authors present reflections on the subject that can be combined with the others regarding the challenges to be faced by scholars and lead us to the question: in what state are they research on the city and education?

2. Social movements: there is a particular strength among children

Social movements, as a theme for investigations and studies, are not always, or almost We would say, they were never linked to childhood. Throughout our history, whose importance of social movements is undeniable, we have learned that this issue is for adults. This reveals a perspective whose centrality in the adult universe, and for the most part male, has gained and maintained immeasurable proportions. Following the development of research in which child universality and adult-centrism gained enormous relevance, making a shift in studies and ways of understanding children and childhood, the presence of children as active in social movements began to be considered. Their voices, emphasized as well as political, as well as their most important needs and desires took up space and became extremely important. This is what we deal with in the articles presented in the subtheme “Social Movements”.

Marlé Aparecida Fideles de Oliveira Vieira and Valdete Côco reflect on Challenges imposed on the work with Landless children in the context of Early Childhood Education in the countryside, and the questions raised were addressed based on references such as Paulo Freire and Mikhail Bakhtin. Coping with certain precariousness combined with knowledge and satisfaction with the profession were the subject of analysis by the authors.

In the wake of studies on settlements, we find the article produced by Leila Damiana Almeida dos Santos, entitled The child in the cultural, sociopolitical and educational aspect of agrarian reform settlements: denials and achievements, in which growing up surrounded by the uncertainty of land ownership produces an insecure life and precarious conditions to continue with school education itself. Turning to the studies of Chronotopies of the Meeting: childhood, university and social movements, the title and theme of the article presented by Carolina Trapp de Queiroz and Rita Ribes Pereira, the authors inquire about encounters and disagreements between universities and social movements, especially when the subject is childhood. The articulation between both universities and social movements is the central focus of the reflections made.

With theoretical reflections that involve important authors for urban studies, in the article Thinking about the city, social movements and education: contributions from Richard Sennett, authors Maria Carmen Silveira Barbosa, Carolina Gobbato and Claines Kremer present fundamental notes to be understood in studies on childhood and the city. The concepts “dwelling” and “building” treated by Richard Sennett are articulated as foundations for city life.

Marineide de Oliveira Gomes concludes this set of texts by contributing reflections on the educational territory of the Heliópolis neighborhood, in the city of São Paulo, SP, Brazil. In the article, called Education in territories and policies for children: the case of the educational neighborhood (Heliópolis- SP), the author deals with the practices carried out in this important neighborhood of the city in which public policies were designed and also articulated with the children.

3. Children and/on the streets, indigenous children, territorial disputes, curriculum and training of teachers

The intercultural perspective, the relationships between indigenous children, black children, trans people, of different ages, men, women, boys and girls have advanced considerably as themes and flags of political struggles in different spaces and by different groups, announcing different ways of understanding them inside and outside the school, in the development of curricular proposals and other social practices.

To get closer to this topic, in the article Representándonos. Una reflexión situada de ciertos contenidos transversales de las ciencias sociales desde una perspectiva intercultural,, by Noelia Enriz, we have reflections on indigenous children present, or absent, in curricular proposals in Argentina. Not limited to their country, the shrewdly carried out questions indicate an approach to the production of subalternity in school curricula.

Tracking reflections about children natives, preponderant in the latter set of texts, we have Kaingang Children in Urban Spaces: Cultural Learning and Indigenous Sustainability in Paraná, by Rosângela Célia Faustino, Maria Simone Jacomini Novak and Lúcio Tadeu Mota. In this article, Kaingang children living in the city of Maringá, in Paraná, are the object of study, above all, in relation to the process of territorial disputes in which urban villages are increasingly disputed, which highlights the market value of their lands to the detriment of their lives. The relationships between indigenous child populations and practices of curricular and urban disputes are also present in the article Meanings attributed to school education by the Guarani of the Morro dos Cavalos/SC Indigenous Land and the articulation of this right with other struggles. Authors Ivone Maria Mendes Silva and Nauíra Zanardo Zanin use imagery sources as a way of understanding children involved in disputes between school education as a right and the life produced inside and outside the Indigenous Land.

In the article Colombian intercultural houses of thoughts: pedagogical practices, indigenous cultures and transnational reflections, produced by Flávio Santiago, Susy Yarley Hinestroza Rodriguez and Roberta Cristina de Paula, we find important reflections on the pedagogical proposals made for and with children in these “houses” Colombian stories for children aged zero to five, highlighting indigenous struggles in their content.

Contributing to curricular studies and their relationships with communities external and internal to Early Childhood Education, we have fishing communities, which can be seen as cultural heritage in several Brazilian regions. They gain important reflections in the article entitled Care in fishing communities: reflections on and for the Early Childhood Education curriculum, by Suzana Marcolino and Adelaide Alves Dias, in which the authors focus on practices that involve forms of care and their importance in the curricular components for Early Childhood Education.

In the article produced by Ranulfo Cavalari Neto and Sonia Maria Dantas Berger, called Vulnerabilities and childhoods on the street: links between the body, street, teacher training and school, the street is the central theme in the relationship with children. Removed from public spaces, their use only occurs circumstantially, or in urban outskirts where games and other relationships are woven on a daily basis. That is, we can infer differences in social class, gender, age, sex and race in the production of street uses and their productions. However, has this topic, especially the homeless population, been addressed in the training processes of teachers and Pedagogy students?

To the urban disputes that urgently need to be studied in conjunction with training processes in education, we add the article and the reflections produced by Lenira Haddad, Maria Assunção Folque and Isabel Bezelga in which the historical and cultural heritage of the State of Alagoas becomes the object of research in The child, city and heritage in the construction of the curriculum and teacher training in early childhood education. To what extent is childhood discussed or considered in debates about heritage? And in cities considered material and intangible heritage assets? The reflections contained join the others regarding territorial disputes and the production of a childhood that is separated from the ability to produce thoughts and proposals. Next, the article entitled Heritage education with children: memories and production of social representations about the city, by Jeysson Ricardo Fernandes da Cunha and Daniela Barros Silva Freire Andrade Correio, addresses the experiences of children in the historic center of the city of Cuiabá, based on the assumption It is a place of memories, affections and cultural identity.

Still on intercultural and decolonial research, education and urban practices, we have the article written by Martin Kuhn, Livio Osvaldo Arenhart and Sueli Salva, entitled Decoloniality and early childhood education: to think about a pedagogy of childhood. The approach brings us closer to studies concerned with childhood pedagogy and its commitment to teacher training with a decolonial and, above all, anti-racist character.

As mentioned previously, by opting for an introductory approach to such challenging and important topics, we hope to spark future debates and deepen those already held today. We highlight that the set of texts presents studies and research developed in five countries, namely: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Portugal.

All we can do is wish you an enriching read and we hope that these publications serve as an inspiring source to encourage discussions and future research.

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