Young children school as a place of elaborated culture

Abstract

Through this article, we reflect on the processes that mediate theory and practice in pre school education. Considering that the environment – the cultural heritage of humanity – constitutes the source of human qualities set as possibilities of appropriation for the new generations at a given time, we seek ways to promote this experience the children of a nursery school on the outskirts of a city in the state of São Paulo. Our starting thesis, guided by cultural-historical theory of human development, advocated by Vygotsky in the texts that support this article, was that the human qualities that we want developed by the children at the end of the process of education must be present in the beginning of its development, guiding that development. Thus, when the child in its earliest forms of expression is surrounded with the more elaborated forms of cultural expressions, he/she will appropriate such elaborated expressions performing a revolution in his/her development. For this study, we follow the activity of children in a group of 5 years old, in a public daycare where one of the authors is a school coordinator. We observed the languages through which the children expressed themselves and enriched this environment to expand the universe of references bringing their everyday experience to a more elaborated level. The outcome was the children’s expression in more elaborated forms, demonstrating the appropriations they achieved having the culture as a source of their development process.