Democracy and curriculum: the need to give a new meaning to children and childhood(s)

Abstract

Recalling one of Dewey thoughts there is a consensus among educators that we should regard early childhood settings and schools as learning spaces for democracy through real life experiences of democratic life. Conceptions of self-centred child, with few realistic ideas about the world and about oneself, make democratic living at the kindergarten impossible. Consequently, democracy learning expresses itself, often in Portuguese early childhood curricula, in the learning of values and morals imposed by the early childhood teacher. These practices are opposite to research results that point to the advantage in children participating in competency development (Bennett, 2004) which is essential to democracy learning.

Changing conceptions culturally rooted about the child /children and the curriculum has been in our concern in the early childhood teachers’ initial training (Aveiro University and Santarém Polytechnic Institute). Keeping that purpose in mind, we developed a research project of investigation-action-training with some teacher students and their supervisors. In this paper we present some results from the study developed with 18 teacher-students and 5 supervisors. We present some conclusions and reflection of this study based on content analysis of their learning portfolios and on semi-structured interviews to teacher-students and their teacher supervisors. The results point to the emergence of some ideas inherent to the conception of the child as a social actor with the capacity and ability of participating in the social life.