SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online

 
vol.37A qualidade das creches conveniadas de Fortaleza em focoDimensões para análise de propostas de avaliação de políticas de Educação Infantil índice de autoresíndice de assuntospesquisa de artigos
Home Pagelista alfabética de periódicos  

Serviços Personalizados

Journal

Artigo

Compartilhar


Educar em Revista

versão impressa ISSN 0104-4060versão On-line ISSN 1984-0411

Educ. Rev. vol.37  Curitiba  2021  Epub 07-Nov-2021

https://doi.org/10.1590/0104-4060.77445 

DOSSIER - Challenges for evaluation in and of Early Childhood Education

Evaluation processes in Early Childhood Education: production of the child and of childhood at risk1

( Universidade Federal de Santa Maria. Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. E-mail: taci.uecker@gmail.com - E-mail: leandrabp@gmail.com


ABSTRACT

This article aims to analyze how, in Early Childhood Education evaluation process, teachers’ reports, which comprise the pedagogical documentation of institutions, operate certain forms of knowledge and regulations, that legitimize a given way and type of childhood and child produced as a subject at risk and to be adjusted. Taking a data file comprised of fragments of pedagogical reports, we conducted an analysis inspired by knowledge and norms as notions - tools, based on studies of Foucault, to show how the uses of this evaluation instrument may be (re)producing forms of knowledge and normative frameworks that produce child - subjects and a position that labels and identifies certain childhoods as subjects at risk and in need of adjustment. Through our analysis, we aimed to show evaluation processes that can naturalize a way of being a child at risk and in need of adjustment. We conclude by pointing out the limit that the set of knowledge and rules put into operation, through evaluation processes, in Early Childhood Education institutions, to identify and label children, may be restricting the perception and work of institutions and teachers, in the sense of understanding the diversity and multiplicity of children and childhoods in contemporary times.

Keywords: Early Childhood Education; Processes of evaluation; Child production

RESUMO

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar como, nos processos de avaliação na Educação Infantil, os pareceres pedagógicos, que compõem a documentação pedagógica das instituições, operam certos saberes e normas que legitimam um determinado modo e tipo de infância e a criança produzida como sujeito em risco e a ser ajustado. Ocupando-se de um arquivo de dados composto por fragmentos de pareceres pedagógicos opera-se uma análise inspirada nas noções - ferramentas, saber e norma, a partir dos estudos foucaultianos, para mostrar como os usos desse instrumento de avaliação pode estar (re)produzindo saberes e matrizes normativas que produzem sujeitos - crianças e uma posição para certas infâncias serem rotuladas e identificadas como em risco e necessidade de ajustamento. Com a análise, busca-se mostrar os processos de avaliação que podem naturalizar um modo de ser criança em risco e a ser ajustada. Conclui-se apontando o limite que o conjunto de saberes e regras colocados em funcionamento, através dos processos de avaliação, nas instituições de Educação Infantil, ao identificar e rotular as crianças, podem estar limitando a percepção e a atuação das instituições e dos docentes no sentido de compreender a diversidade e multiplicidade de criança(s) e de infância(s) na contemporaneidade.

Palavras-chave: Educação Infantil; Processos de Avaliação; Produção da criança

Our experience as teachers and researchers of Basic and Higher Education has led us to highlight, analyze, and evidence numerous situations in which educational practices, in different formative and institutional spaces and times, allow us to problematize and question regimes of truths in which such practices, spaces, and times are embodied. In this article, we seek to problematize professional activities in a broad way and, specifically, to think about how pedagogical reports, through the act of writing - i.e. produced by teachers - result in a document of the evaluation processes of children in Early Childhood Education and how they can be understood and how ways of speaking of and naming childhood and children can therefore be produced: thus producing child subjects.

The development of research involving mechanisms, strategies and policies for producing subjects, in educational practices, is the thematic focus of this article, more specifically, the strategies we use in our teaching experiences (ours and those of teachers) regarding production of evaluation of the performances of children/students and, in the case of Early Childhood Education, production of pedagogical reports. We take the idea of teaching experience in which evaluation is epistemically identified in what Foucault (2010) characterizes as focal points of experience, i.e., what goes through us and invents us as teachers and, at the same time, invents child-subjects in a regime of truth.

It is present history and contemporary philosophy that enable us to think about this production and constitution of subjects taking three axes: first, the forms of knowledge in which it is possible to speak about the subject; second, the normative frameworks in which the individuals' behaviors must be inscribed in order to be considered/represented as subjects; and third, the projection that forms of knowledge and normative frameworks offer as modes of existence so that others, through mediation, and individuals themselves can produce themselves as subjects (FOUCAULT, 2010).

We can perceive in these axes an order for the government of experience in a regime of truth, based on which it is possible to speak of the production and constitution of the Early Childhood Education teachers, who, through effect, through the forms of knowledge and normative framework they use in their educational-pedagogical and evaluative work in the development, behaviors and learning of children, act to produce, identify and constitute the child and childhood, governed and legitimized by knowledge intermediated and operated by Early Childhood Education policies and institutions.

We structured this article so as to think about evaluation processes in Early Childhood Education institutions taking pedagogical reports written by teachers and to analyze how they relate the institution and the teachers' options for making records about children to certain forms of knowledge and norms (behavioral, structural values and moral values) that legitimize a certain way of being and type of childhood and child.

Ways of speaking, ways of being childhood and of being a child deploy agency in Early Childhood Education institutions and pedagogical reports. Through these ways we can analyze and understand, by activating norm concepts-tools and normality/normalization gradients, how enunciative practices and forms of knowledge in the institution of Early Childhood Education are working to fabricate the child-subject (the normal child, the deviant child, the child at risk, the child who needs to be adjusted).

Methodologically, inspired by Foucauldian studies, three units of analysis were built, namely: the forms of knowledge that drive the work of Early Childhood Education institutions and teachers; the normative frameworks of behavior for individuals in relation to the power to invent the child and childhood; and the gradients of normality derived from the normative framework that operate the classification and production of children (individually).

The units of analysis were built based on the ways teachers enunciate, by evaluation, judgment by truth and in writing, children in their pedagogical reports, which were taken as documents2 that can determine the places of children/subjects in the world. The evaluation processes which, registered in pedagogical reports, position the subject in relation to normative determinants that are invented by discursive practices and pedagogical knowledge, that is, the invention of spaces and times that the child will occupy in the organization of its family, school, and community, whereby this position is legitimated by the discourse produced by the evaluation. The pedagogical reports that form the analytical material in this text will be referred to with the letter P plus the number of their order in the data set used in the research. We collected 179 pedagogical reports produced between 2015 and 2017, at a Municipal Early Childhood Education School in the interior region of the State of Rio Grande do Sul. These reports were produced every six months individually by the teachers and, to comply with ethical standards and preserve our commitment to research, we chose not to mention any element that could identify the children or the teachers, even though we had authorization from the school and the Municipal Department of Education to which it was subordinated to use the data from these reports for our research.

Given the use of pedagogical reports as a source of analytical data for this research, it is also important to consider that the reports, which were the material from which we gathered and produced the data for analysis, were produced by female teachers at an Early Childhood Education institution and, in this context, the question of gender and the feminization of the teaching profession appear in the body of knowledge of a regime of truth about children and childhood, which will be superficially considered here.

The excerpts from the reports that are discussed in this article are, therefore, a set of fragments taken from the data file produced as analytical material for a larger study that intended, as its object of investigation, to analyze the production of childhood and children taking as reference the discursive practices recorded in pedagogical reports produced by teachers in the institution of Early Childhood Education. That study pointed to the multiplicity of knowledge and even other ways of thinking and producing childhoods in contemporary times. We therefore chose to present in this article part of that study that seeks to identify analytically how, in the pedagogical reports, normative parameters that regulate a way of narrating and enunciating children and childhoods at risk appear, whereby risk, or the determination of the risk that each person can be and/or cause, is one of the strategies of a society of control (control of the life of the population and of the individual) that puts into operation normative forms of knowledge about childhood and the child in educational institutions, considering that

[...] to prevent is first and foremost to keep watch over, that is, to put oneself in a position to foresee the emergence of undesirable events (diseases, anomalies, deviant behavior, acts of delinquency, etc.) within statistical populations, marked as bearers of risk. But the mode of keeping watch promoted by these preventive policies is totally new in relation to that of traditional disciplinary techniques (CASTEL, 1987, p. 125-126, our translation).

In this sense, we will not present an analytical model of counterpoints, differing opinions or defense, which also leads to the clarification that we would not have enough pages in this article to problematize the context of production of pedagogical reports, as well as to discuss their circulation and the context of their influence on the family, community, society, for the production of children and childhoods.

After providing clarification about the data and what we intend to analyze, we return to the content or practices of what is said about the child in the evaluation processes. As a starting point, we clarify that, for us, the institution of Early Childhood Education and the teachers, objectively trained and subjectively constituted to work there, produce space, time, and relations in which it is possible to fabricate a place-world for a position-child. This fabrication is possible based on knowledge about childhood, power relations that drive Early Childhood Education institutions (their teaching, learning and evaluation practices), which, guided by a normality framework, establish a gradient, a degree of variation, so that different children can occupy different positions by being named and produced based on the evaluation and examination of their ways of being and behaving.

It is clear to us that knowledge and, consequently, the subject-position are not found in the texts described in the pedagogical reports, but rather in the analysis of the historical, social, cultural and economic meanings that make these written records impact directly and indirectly on the practices of production of childhood and children, on the ways in which childhood education institutions are organized, and on the ways teachers act in their pedagogical processes.

We consider that the pedagogical reports are public syntheses of the practices used to evaluate children and their childhoods in Early Childhood Education. They are built by teachers from an institutional decision process and are a functional responsibility of the teachers. Above all, the pedagogical reports, as part of the pedagogical documentation, by describing, inventing and producing meanings, and because of this, are laden with identities, objects and goals, which also determine a direction, or for whom they are intended.

Pedagogical reports as a type of document produced in Early Childhood Education institutions have as their object: - to speak of the child, its development process, its behaviors and its conduct; - to trace a memory of its development, its behaviors and its conduct so that, in a file, we can go about sorting a place and an identity of its way of being a child, both so that it can be identified by others, and so that it can go recognizing and constituting itself from what specialists in Early Childhood Education say about it; - to communicate the school's narrative about the child to its parents or guardians presenting, finally, an effective recipient for the construction of a way of being at the present time, that alerts like a dossier as to its future perspectives, which can be those of a "good" citizen, or can represent risk and indicate what would be need to be done, immediately, to adjust this child-subject.

It is, therefore, in this sense that the ways children are narrated in the pedagogical reports indicate the sense of subject-position and places for them to occupy in the world. One of the places that has concerned us, as teachers-trainers-researchers, is the place of risk and the place in need of adjustment, as can be seen in the following records taken from the pedagogical reports:

P41 - “[...] sometimes when he’s playing he ends up hurting his classmates [...] selfishness, [...] does not want to share toys with classmates, sometimes snatching them from the classmate’s hand, when he doesn’t resort to biting.”

P51 - “[...] I notice difficulty in controlling emotions, both positive and negative.”

P102 - “[...] has shown certain inappropriate reactions when it’s time to share toys, and for this reason he has frequently got involved in conflicts with his classmates.”

P112 - “Doesn’t like to be contradicted and when this happens he reacts negatively demonstrating his dissatisfaction with what is happening, at times he has been aggressive with classmates and teachers.”

P116 - “[...] expresses negative emotions [...] when something doesn’t please him [...] picks fights with classmates and cries, [...] does not accept abiding by what the class has agreed on [...]”

P135 - “[...] doesn’t concentrate for long on the same activity and prefers more boisterous games, [...] ”

P150 - “at times has conflicts with classmates when disputing for toys, so that teachers have to intervene to solve the problem, when it happens he cries and hits his classmates...” (Data file produced for the Study, 2017)

Knowledge and norms: a model for identifying child risk and adjustment in Early Childhood Education

Early Childhood Education institutions, through their practices of making records in pedagogical reports, take on the role of marking the development of children/subjects, operating with a set of knowledge and norms that deploy agency over a model and a process of investment in childhood based on political, social, cultural and economic expectations. It is, therefore, from the institutional perspective of a teacher-subject position established in the relations of knowledge and power (relations produced by them as experts in the education of children) that one can speak of the production of children/subjects, as we understand to be this set of knowledge that produces childhoods and children.

Before going into this analysis, we need to indicate our understanding of the notion of knowledge. To do so, we turn to Foucault's writings when he states:

Knowledge is that which we can speak of in a discursive practice which is specified as follows: the domain comprised of different objects which will or will not acquire a scientific status [...]; knowledge is also the space in which the subject can take up a position in order to speak of the objects he is concerned with in his discourse [...]; finally, knowledge is defined by possibilities of use and appropriation offered by discourse [...]. There is knowledge that is independent of the sciences [...]; but there is no knowledge without a defined discursive practice, and every discursive practice can be defined by the knowledge it forms (FOUCAULT, 2015, p. 219-220, our translation).

Based on this excerpt, we begin to understand the forms of knowledge set in motion in the pedagogical reports that speak of children and become discursive practices that, recurrently, create a normative image of child development and conduct. More than that, these forms of knowledge: objectify children's development and their conduct; produce scales for this stage of human life; operate the training and work of teachers, who are legitimized in the position of experts and, finally, designate, represent, evaluate and interpret each of the children/subjects in Early Childhood Education institutions. For this reason, more than scientific knowledge of child development and learning, these forms of knowledge constitute practices, at the same time that practices and records in the pedagogical reports constitute the knowledge that the Early Childhood Education teachers as a whole produce, through their pedagogical reports, to speak about children and childhood.

We were able to identify the forms of knowledge that legitimize a way of speaking - classifying, naming, identifying - about children as we analyzed the study data files, into three types that, together or separately, constitute the forms of knowledge that operate and deploy agency in the institution of Early Childhood Education, forms of evaluation recorded by the teachers and, consequently, the (re)production, by the evaluation, of the normal child and the child (at risk) that needs to be adjusted and to adjust itself.

From the perspective of forms of knowledge, the first one we identified in operation in the pedagogical reports was what we call biological knowledge, that is, a biological model of development that is modeled by statistics and also reinforced by ways of speaking such as: P38 - “is [...] appropriate for his age group”.

Under this biological model, the individual

[...] appears as a being [...] that receives stimuli, responds to them, adapts, evolves, submits to the demands of the environment, harmonizes with the modifications it imposes, seeks to erase imbalances, acts according to regularities, has, in short, conditions of existence and the possibility of finding norms, means of adjustment that allow it to exercise its functions (FOUCAULT, 2007, p. 493-494, our translation).

This type of biological knowledge forms the norm and the average for individuals to be children, in institutions it operates a way of speaking of things, deploying agency over what is disseminated en masse, for example, by vaccination booklets. A form of popularization of a norm and an average that tells the truth about what each child should be/do in each age range. It presents age and growth, age and development so that each child can be evaluated according to tables predetermined by normality curves.

It is a statistical biological model that is understood as truth, since “it lies in the form of knowledge aimed at life in the organism, in growth, in stages, to put it briefly, in the rule of normality of life itself and of each person's life” (POSSA, 2013, p. 97, our translation), which can also be considered to be biopolitics, the power over life and, in this sense, the power to determine a form/identity of life for each child and all children, which can be invented/produced and, when they are outside this norm, consider them to be at risk or needing to be adjusted.

The second form knowledge we identified is called social-cultural knowledge, that is, the social-cultural plan that, in the form of knowledge produced about history, society, and ways of thinking about childhood, makes the institution and the teachers relate to children and childhoods. This knowledge is activated by teachers and objectively drives their processes of collective objectivation and individual subjectivation, a form of knowledge with which they act and dominate true speech about the child, producing social and cultural places that are occupied both by teachers and by children. As an example of this knowledge in action in the pedagogical reports, we identified the teacher's interpretation of the individual traits of a child that challenge the notion of the authority of the adult and collective rules:

we are facing some difficulties with J. in obeying some of the rules in the classroom, the canteen and the playground. [...] He likes to challenge orders given by teachers, doing the opposite of what he was asked to do and at times gets involved in conflicts when disputing for toys (P123).

It is worth mentioning, even though this is not a subject of analysis in this article, that it is in social-cultural knowledge that we find the notion of gender as a substratum to explain the social, economic, political relations based on the difference between the sexes and the power relationship that historically, socially, and culturally invent the place of women in Western society (SCOTT, 1995). Culturally, women (and children) are on a given side in history and, at different times, roles and symbolisms attached to a person’s sex create “systems of meaning, [...] to the ways in which societies represent gender, use it to articulate the rules of social relations or to construct the meaning of experience” (SCOTT, 1995, p. 82, our translation). The relationship between the meaning and experience of the feminine forms an historical unit of analysis on child education that places maternity as a role and symbolism that could characterize teaching in Early Childhood Education. The feminization of teaching in Early Childhood Education is made explicit in that the authority of women-teachers seems to be natural for mastery of maternal and evaluative conditions and, therefore, legitimizes the ability of teaching to evaluate, think and adjust childhood.

The third form of knowledge that the institution of Early Childhood Education uses, as perceived in the pedagogical reports, was psycho-pedagogical knowledge. It is a combination of knowledge related to the areas of psychology and pedagogy, considering that the former becomes the framework for the latter. It is a psycho-normative model for linguistic, psychomotor, cognitive, social and emotional development that is a reference for the description, comparison, classification, evaluation, and identification of each and every child according to a normality grid. This model provides Early Childhood Education with the conditions that enable the possibility of identifying the normal child; the deviant child; the child at risk; the child who needs to be adjusted and/or identified according to other standards that turn abnormal into normal, such as developmental and behavioral disabilities and disorders; the child that is in one or more positions in the model. This can be identified in the following fragments:

P03 - [...] good relationship with classmates and teachers. She is a cheery, affectionate, intelligent and active girl, she likes to take part in classroom activities and to play in the schoolyard, interacting with all her classmates, but she does not like to share toys, resorting to crying and screaming [...] (our emphasis).

P16 - Considering the age range of the pupils, restricted to three to four years old and consequently their stage of development [...] spoken language is well developed, but doesn’t say more than what is necessary. Understands the norms and rules defined by the class, but doesn’t always keep to them. [...] Likes to listen to music, but doesn’t sing doing the same as her other classmates clapping her hands and making gestures. [...] her motor development is good (our emphasis).

P30 - Demonstrates that she likes to listen to music [...], but when she should make gestures and dance, she is shy and doesn’t do it (our emphasis).

P04 - [...] a calm infant, [...] she shows herself to be an active and bright child, [...] she likes toys that please her, she’s curious and interested in everything around her, [... ] is a little reluctant to drink water, we keep on offering it until she finally drinks it, [...] she needs to be ‘rocked’ in her pram, she’s a little bit resistant to going to sleep (our emphasis).

There is a model of enunciation about the child, deployed as agency in the institution of Early Childhood Education, which seems to be crossed by an apparatus of control and watching over and, in the records, it seems that the teachers take on a position of knowledge to register in the perspective of the individual the distinction between the normal child, the needy child, the child at risk and the child to be adjusted (child-positions).

P22 - [...] he’s a dear, bright, curious, active and at times mischievous boy; [...] he tends to daydream and is easily distracted [...], so that at times his lack of attention reflects negatively on his concentration [...] his emotional state oscillates with his everyday mischief, in some situations he has difficulty in understanding and abiding by limits established in the classroom” (our emphasis).

P36 - [...] a dear and lovable child, but quite nervy and insecure”

P51 - [...] difficulty in controlling her emotions, both positive and negative, [...] has notions of space and time, laterality, recognizes colors and shapes and is able to group similar ones together (our emphasis).

P74 - [...] he is able express himself with regard to his needs and wishes despite showing language difficulties, for this reason we think it is essential for him to have speech therapy follow-up [...] to be able to overcome his difficulties... (our emphasis).

P153 - [...] is having follow-up with the speech therapist to help him together with the school and his family in his process of building and expanding his spoken language (our emphasis).

Among the words highlighted in the previous passages of the fragments/data file, we can identify: but; resists; needs; lacks; oscillates; has difficulties; difficulty; despite and follow-up. These words show the record of control, watching over, and the need for correction and, at the same time, the position of a child at risk and a child that needs to be adjusted. The evaluation process involving enunciation about the child establishes and drives forward, bringing into play the gradient of normalities, in which the “[...] most comprehensive and foreseen uses on a curve with differentiated gradients of normality [...] created through the establishment of that which is considered to be normal, point out abnormal and need [...]” (LOPES, 2009, p. 158, our translation). Here, it appears to us, is one of the goals of the evaluation process in Early Childhood Education, that of speaking of and producing children and, as a major caveat, identifying children to be adjusted, reclassifying them continuously during the educational process.

Finally, knowledge establishes power relations, putting into operation, in the institution of Early Childhood Education and in the work of teachers, a system of regularity, in which it is possible to identify normal and abnormal, but, above all, to identify the different curves of normality on which the institution, teachers and families should act so that the child fits into one of these curves, that is, an operation intended to normalize, since,

[...] it will consist of “making these different distributions of normality work in relation to one and other [...]. The norm is at stake within the differential normalities. That which is normal comes first, and the norm is deduced from it [...]” (Foucault, 2008a, p. 83). In operations intended to normalize - which imply both bringing the deviant to the realm of normality and naturalizing the presence of such deviants in the social context where they circulate - certain marks, certain traits, and certain impediments of different orders should be minimized. To this end, we see the creation, by the State, of political strategies aimed at normalizing irregularities present in the population. Among the strategies created so that normality is established within the frameworks in which the threat of danger appears, it is possible to mention the creation of social work policies and social and educational inclusion policies, among others. Both, after all, can be seen as inclusive actions that aim to bring to normality parts of the population threatened by misery, disease, disability, lack of social security, lack of schooling, etc. (LOPES, 2009, p.160, our translation).

The normalization operation takes normality “as a moving field or zone of instability [...] they impose themselves as invitations for us to constantly be others or to be different than we were” (FABRIS; LOPES, 2013, p. 45, our translation). This is how, through its effect, knowledge that frames a way of being a child and childhood operates in the institutions and also through teachers, because normality is also normation - the normality of normatization.

In view of the need for normalization, evaluation processes in Early Childhood Education can therefore, due to gradients and regularities, create certain displacements in which forms of knowledge (biological, social-cultural and psychopedagogical knowledge) “[...] do not stem from the norm, but, on the contrary, turn it into a gradient, or rather, a possibility of expanding the norm and making it flexible for other conformations” (RECH, 2010, p. 75, our translation) and, among these conformations, we find children at risk and those who need to be adjusted.

For this reason, besides evaluating and classifying, evaluation processes in Early Childhood Education can also aim to normalize children, even maladjusted children, naturalizing their presence, composing a social gradient for being in and participating in the institution of Early Childhood Education, because each individual named and identified as a child, besides being 'dealt with' based on the benchmark of normality derived from the norm (normation), can be evaluated, qualified and shown (to its family and the community) as yet another that is framed in a zone of determined and unstable normality that enables practices of greater control and adjustment to be generated.

This possibility occurs because the institution of Early Childhood Education, its teachers and the ways in which children are evaluated and described in the pedagogical reports deploy agency over forms of knowledge that seem to be fixed in a romanticized and normatized (romantic-normatized) way of childhood, which is conceived as a magical period, of joys and carefreeness or deviations that can be adjusted and controlled, as in the following fragment:

P116 - [...] expresses her negative emotions when something she doesn't like happens [...] gets angry, fights with her classmates and cries, at times like these with dialogue and respect we are trying to enable her to live with, accept and understand everyday situations, as well as to control her emotions and feelings during disputes for toys and objects, and also to accept and abide by agreements made by the class, thus expanding her notion of the world and her sensitivity towards others and herself (our emphasis).

The effects of the evaluation process as in the description contained in this pedagogical report, and in others that we could use as examples, point to a form of invention of the child that indicates certain forms of knowledge in action, which makes it possible to determine which child expresses negative emotions, but also, as shown in other fragments throughout this text, which children express themselves through tantrums, being stubborn, aggressive, violent, daydreaming, being inattentive, uncooperative, lacking concentration, among other ways of classifying.

The description of behaviors and the way this description is done in the evaluation processes, whether in pedagogical reports, or, moreover, in any act of speaking, conversation between teachers, dialogue with families, or the ways in which relationships between teachers and children and between a child and other children are organized, or the form of writing and images used in any other pedagogical documentation, invent, name and produce identities by processes of objectification and subjectification - processes that speak of how the individual becomes an object of knowledge and how, in this, the individual himself perceives and constitutes himself. By speaking of children, through knowledge and normativities built by psycho-pedagogical and socio-cultural regimes of truths, Early Childhood Education institutions and their teachers (re)produce them as a way of being a legitimate subject of a given type of knowledge and, at the same time, a way the child perceives itself and can constitute itself; about how the family, the community or even the next year's teacher will build its relations with the child.

If objectification processes speak of the ways in which the subject could become an object for knowledge, evaluation processes in Early Childhood Education can, therefore, speak of the invention of children. In this vein, we can understand that objectification and subjectification processes are complementary processes that are related through what Foucault (2010) called games of truth, when knowledge and legitimated and shared rules regulate socially and culturally a mode of discourse production and a practice that is representative of the subjects in these discourses. This means that the truths attributed to children in Early Childhood Education evaluation processes are, “[...] ultimately, effects of truth produced by strategic mechanisms of power that impute certain norms to the subject, classifying, subjecting, and training them” (IBRAHIM; VILHENA, 2014, p. 122-123, our translation).

It is our understanding that we need to use this analysis when thinking about Early Childhood Education institutions and teachers' work in processes of evaluating and producing children and, consequently, producing childhood that has its boundaries delimited in biological, psycho-pedagogical and sociocultural knowledge restricted to that which naturalizes and makes things mundane, customarily, what we have called and represented as a child-childhood at risk and/or in need of adjustment.

Finally, while not wanting to bring the development of this analysis to an end, we summarize the objective of this article, which was to think about evaluation processes in the Early Childhood Education institutions taking, as an object of analysis, fragments of pedagogical reports written by teachers and that, as a data file, allow us to analyze how the institutions and the teachers' options of making records about the children are, due to certain forms of knowledge and norms (behavioral, structural values and moral values), legitimating a certain way of being and type of childhood and child. The contribution we hope to make with this analysis is that we can study together with Early Childhood Education teachers and institutions, and understand the limit that the set of knowledge and rules operated by the games of truth that we put into operation, in contemporary times, can speak of, name, identify and label children, may be limiting teaching from understanding the multiple and diverse child(ren) and childhood(s) that are in Early Childhood Education institutions.

So as not to conclude… an invitation to carry on thinking...

Driven by the need to carry on thinking and, at times, to carry on thinking about the same thing in other ways, we proposed an analysis of evaluation processes that are carried out in Early Childhood Education institutions, through teachers' written pedagogical reports. They are documents in which the child comes to exist in the description and, as a result, in the evaluation and judgment of their behavior, actions and conduct. Moreover, the pedagogical reports, produced from biological knowledge, psycho-pedagogical and socio-cultural knowledge, constitute the identification of children who may represent a risk, and who are preventively placed in the position of a subject at risk, of a subject to be adjusted.

Our analysis indicates that Early Childhood Education institutions, in their evaluation processes, tend to represent deviance as a “mark, a way of these subjects being and acting” (RECH, 2011, p. 39, our translation) and, in order for them to fit into a norm or gradient, it is necessary to describe that which is naturalized as deviation by the games of truth.

Throughout our study, it appeared that the institution of Early Childhood Education and its teachers have acted so that, through knowledge and normative frameworks, evaluation fulfills the function of giving existence to risk and need for adjustment so that behaviors can be molded and a developmental turn can be forced in order to universalize a way of being a child and a way of childhood.

To put it another way, the evaluation processes seem to indicate the need for the child at risk to be adjusted, as they speak about development, behavior and ways of relating in the world, based on a normality grid, that is, based on the possibility of giving visibility to normality and the borders between abnormality, or even speaking of the student who transits the normality curve with characteristics and behaviors that become displaced, but that are being normalized in positions and places of the child and childhood that will mark and label lives and experiences of children/subjects.

The place we want to occupy with this article is to put under suspension and suspicion the forms of knowledge that legitimize a certain type of childhood and child. It seems to us that evaluation processes in Early Childhood Education need to be problematized with regard to what teachers, in the role of experts who watch over children, and institutions have naturalized when circulating truths that have constituted children and their childhoods by comparison, production and identification, “[...] a form of watching over that makes it possible to classify, order, hierarchize, recover, in short, to position” (SARDAGNA, 2008, p. 145, our translation) and, ultimately, promote the erasure of differences and childhood(s).

Suspension and suspicion is what we proposed to think about here and beyond. To suspend and suspect the universalized, generalized and naturalized forms of knowledge and rules that we use to invent children and childhood in contemporary times, as well as the limit that these processes of evaluation, through games of truth, prevent us, either as Early Childhood Education trainers and/or teachers, from perceiving and considering the multiple and diverse children and childhoods that arrive at and are in Early Childhood Education institutions.

With this, we return to the first paragraph of this text to state that the experience as teachers and researchers of Basic and Higher Education has shown us that problematizing and questioning regimes of truths that put into operation Early Childhood Education practices, including evaluation processes, is a possible path to be built collectively, because we have, at least, one certainty: no one is able to offer or transform spaces and ways of acting without understanding how and why they came to act and do it one way or another. What we do and how we put it into operation and what we concern ourselves about when we produce evaluation processes that invent or, at least, mark the existence of children and childhoods at risk and undergoing adjustment.

REFERENCES

CASTEL, Robert. A gestão dos riscos: da antipsiquiatria à pós psicanálise. Tradução de Celina Luz. Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves, 1987. [ Links ]

FABRIS, Elí Teresinha Henn; LOPES, Maura Corcini. Inclusão & Educação. Minas Gerais: Autêntica, 2013. [ Links ]

FOUCAULT, Michel. As palavras e as coisas. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2007. [ Links ]

FOUCAULT, Michel. O governo de si e dos outros. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2010. [ Links ]

FOUCAULT, Michel. A arqueologia do saber. 8. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 2015. [ Links ]

IBRAHIM, Elza; VILHENA, Junia. Jogos de linguagem/jogos de verdade: de Wittgenstein a Foucault. Arq. bras. psicol., Rio de Janeiro, v. 66, n. 2, p. 114-127, 2014. Disponível em: Disponível em: http://pepsic.bvsalud.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1809-52672014000200009&lng=en&nrm=iso . Acesso em 10 ago. 2020. [ Links ]

LOPES, Maura Corcini. Políticas de Inclusão e Governamentalidade. Educação e Realidade, Porto Alegre, v. 34, n. 2, p. 153-169, maio/ago. 2009. Disponível em:https://seer.ufrgs.br/educacaoerealidade/article/download/8297/5536. Acesso em: 17 jun. 2019. [ Links ]

POSSA, Leandra Bôer. Formação em educação especial na UFSM: estratégias e modos de constituir-se professor. 2013. 240 p. Tese (Doutorado em Educação) - Universidade Federal de Santa Maria. Santa Maria, RS, 2013. [ Links ]

RECH, Tatiana Luiza. A emergência da inclusão escolar no governo FHC: movimentos que a tornaram uma “verdade” que permanece. 2010. 186 p. Dissertação (Mestrado em Educação) - Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Novo Hamburgo, RS, 2010. [ Links ]

RECH, Tatiana Luiza. A emergência da inclusão escolar no Brasil. In: THOMA, Adriana da Silva; HILLESCHEIM, Betina. Políticas de inclusão: gerenciando riscos e governando as diferenças. Santa Cruz do Sul: EDUNISC, 2011. p. 19-34. [ Links ]

SARDAGNA, Helena Venites. Práticas normalizadoras na educação especial: um estudo a partir da rede municipal de ensino de Novo Hamburgo -RS (1950-2007). 2008. 227 p. Tese (Doutorado em Educação) - Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Novo Hamburgo, RS, 2008. [ Links ]

SCOTT, Joan. Gênero: uma categoria útil para análise histórica. Educação & Realidade, Porto Alegre, v. 20, n. 2, p. 71-99, jul./dez. 1995. Disponível em:Disponível em:https://seer.ufrgs.br/educacaoerealidade/article/view/71721/40667 . Acesso em: 5 ago. 2020. [ Links ]

1Translated by David Ian Harrad. E-mail: davidharrad@hotmail.com

2It is our understanding that pedagogical reports are part of what has been called pedagogical documentation and can be associated with other forms of records, such as accounts of experiences, photographs, things produced by children, planning documents, which position the selection, organization, preparation of records and evaluation, both of the child and the school.

Received: October 21, 2020; Accepted: June 01, 2021

Creative Commons License Este é um artigo publicado em acesso aberto sob uma licença Creative Commons