As interações entre educador e bebê em um berçário: o papel da linguagem

Abstract

This research derived from an academic path, which started in the graduation course, and which arouse the desire to look at babies in the language acquisition stage who, getting into nurseries and kindergartens younger and younger, are inserted in school environment, that is, separated from their mothers. It is understood that both kindergartens and nursery educators play an essential role in the subjective formation of these children, and, when approaching baby care in nurseries, the relationship with the Other - the interaction between the educator/carer and the baby - is considered to be fundamental for the constitution of language and of the subject. The theoretical assumptions that support this work are from the Interactionism in the area of language acquisition, proposed by Claudia de Lemos, which, from the approximation towards the European structuralism in Linguistics and Psychoanalysis, understand that language is the cause for a subject to exist, since it is language that places a body into a scene to mobilize a text, even if using motor skills and without articulated speech, as in the case of babies, and in which there is a pulsatory body, or else, which asks for the Other’s interpretation. Based on this theoretical framework, which is also the basis of the Clinic of Language, this work aims at observing how the educator-baby relations take place in order to capture the effects that children’s verbal and non-verbal productions have on educators, how interactions take place and how play is carried out in this scenario. The data of the research resulted from 17 observation sessions in a nursery, in daily activities, where there were eight babies aged from 04 to 18 months old. The observations were recorded on video, and afterwards they were transcribed with basis on the Preti’s conventions (1999). To carry out the analysis, specific scenes of the registered interactions were cut out. The results obtained show that: the dynamics and the routine of the nursery are hard work and do not favor the interactions between the teacher and the babies; the moment when most interactions occur is when feeding and cleaning the babies; teachers and interns take different positions before the babies; playing is interwoven with doing in the nursery. The final considerations of this research point out the importance of the social role that kindergartens and nursery teachers play regarding babies, as well as the importance of the Other in their subjective and speaking constitution. The baby who is there, because he/she is still in the appeals of language, is an enigma who questions the Other, who questions the educator’s role, indicating that the role of the nursery is another one, different from the role of preschool.