Narratives of children about their experiences with violence in everyday school life
(Auto)biographical research with children; Narratives; Violence; School routine; Conversations circles.
This dissertation brings research results conducted with 14 children from 8 to 11 years old, students from a public school in the city of Natal / RN who tell us about their experiences with violence in everyday school life in their narratives. From a theoretical point of view, the study is in the perspective of an (auto) biographical research with children, and it is based on the assumption of legitimacy of the child's word as subject of rights. As methodology of the research we used the conversation circles where children were asked to tell to a little Alien their daily lives at school. In their narratives spontaneously situations of violence experienced by them in school and beyond emerge. From the discussions prepared by Charlot (2002) we identified three types of violence in the children everyday school life: violence at school, including fights and aggresions among students within the school; violence against school, subdivided into internal violence as the acts of vandalism to property, mess and disorder perpetrated by children from school, and violence at an external area of the school, involving social problems of the neighborhood where the school is located, such as conflicts between rival gangs, drug trafficking, murders and constant firefights that somehow interfere in the daily school; and finally, school violence, practiced against children by the school, and that manifests itself in ways that are handled by an adult-perception of school, against their ways of being and seeing the world, which is considered by them to unjust acts against the impossibility of (re) acting for fear of punishment, but that kind of violence directs the way children perceive themselves and builds representations of themselves as students within the institution and as people in the social life. We conclude, therefore, that the children's narratives about school violence brings significant contributions to the research with children in search of guaranteeing their rights as citizens and a peace education.