Coloniality and playing outdoors

Although the expression playing outdoors refers to freedom, autonomy and spontaneity, even the open spaces of an early childhood education institution can be environments in which adultcentric coloniality persists over children.

During the investigation, we noticed colonial aspects in the organization and structure of the school, colonial attitudes among the teachers and colonial attitudes among the children themselves.

1. Colonial aspects in the organization and structure of the institution

As the research observations took place only in outdoor spaces, it is from this place that some organizational colonial aspects are evaluated.

Although the school is located in a countryside area, the educational activities have urbanized characteristics. Even though it has a very suitable outdoor space, there are no vegetable gardens or plants commonly cultivated in the community. We didn't see the use of toys or moments of play or exploration of the area as a way of bringing the school closer to local values and realities, or any activities involving people from the community, i.e. the institution didn't propose any activities related to the local community.

Looking from the perspectives of subordinate peoples is an essential stage in the construction of a countryside decolonial education starting in Early Childhood Education, providing an opportunity to make visible the cultures produced in everyday life by common people who have been silenced in the colonial process. ^{Batista and Euclides (2020}) highlight the importance of rejecting Eurocentric principles that value the knowledge and experiences of central contexts and dominant countries, disregarding other ways of being and living, such as those of countryside people. This urbanized way of considering countryside education is linked to the pursuit of overcoming its countryside cultures, considered as archaic.

In addition to the large park rides, few conventional toys are found in these play spaces. However, those that are offered to children do not represent the country life or the physical appearance of most of them, such as white dolls with straight hair, especially the Barbies⁴.

One way of colonial-adultcentric control of childhood is through the culture of play. When adults decide which toys to make or give to children, they are directing what and how they should play with (^{Monteiro and Delgado, 2014}). The Barbie doll is a toy created in a country that exercises colonial domination, with a standard of beauty that is not the Latin American standard. It “presents a female body image built according to hygienist and Eurocentric patterns, educating for a kind of beauty considered hegemonic” (^{Cechin and Silva, 2012}, p. 631, translated by the authors). Although today there are these dolls with different appearances and representing other peoples, in a commercial attempt to convey a vision of diversity, the main doll that dominates the whole context of the “Barbie world” is the white one with straight, blonde hair.

Thus, colonial thinking, which hierarchizes peoples according to race and considers white superiority to be natural, continues to be fostered through the celebrity and superiority of the blonde Barbie. Indeed, the Barbies that the children played with at the institution had this pattern. On one occasion, a five-year-old girl approached, combing the long blonde hair of a Barbie, and said with a pleased smile: “-When I untangle her hair, it becomes straight.” So, I asked: “-Do you prefer straight or curly hair?” She answered, as if it were obvious: “- Straight.” (translated by the authors).

This leads to a reflection on a phrase that has become the slogan of some social movements: “representativeness matters!”, which highlights the necessity of representations that question the colonial images of white superiority, the result of the coloniality of power that established race and racial identity as “instruments of basic social classification of the population” (^{Quijano, 2005}, p. 130, translated by the authors).

In this sense, a decolonial Early Childhood Education is committed to the diverse representativities of subjugated peoples, seeking, for example, to “resignify and build positive representations of black people, their history, their culture, their corporality and their aesthetics” (^{Gomes, 2003}, p. 81, translated by the authors).

A structural and organizational aspect concurring with coloniality is the Extension's outdoor physical space, where 4- and 5-year-old children are cared for. In this space, they are enclosed, distant from the natural world and pruned, due to its inadequate size for the number of children who use it.

In this sense, ^{Tiriba, Santos and Schaefer (2023}, p. 21) inquire about walling in, understanding it as a strategy “of the dominant social forces to maintain the principles, values, modes of social functioning and individual behavior that sustain and perpetuate modernity/coloniality relations even today” (translated by the authors).

In this space of the institution, due to its small size, children get hurt easily. With this in mind, the teachers control their movements excessively. The control of children's bodies is a colonial-adultcentric aspect that regulates and even prevents free play, the production of peer play cultures and children's autonomy.

Beyond a structural aspect, the use of this space for “free play” reveals an organizational dimension that follows colonial principles, rejecting other possibilities, such as using the community square in front of the institution or making more use of the outdoor space at the main building of the school. The walling in of Early Childhood Education is a colonial approach and the “freedom of the body is a requirement of decolonial methodologies” (^{Tiriba, Santos and Schaefer, 2023}, p. 21, 22, translated by the authors). A proposal that tries to leave the four corners of the institution to be closer to community life or that explores other spaces and times beyond those conventionalized by capitalist urban thinking offers decolonial ways of educating.

Usually, the teachers don't accompany the children in the daily activities in the playground, and this role is assigned to the monitors. The teachers only participate with the children in this space of recreation when it is an extra activity to the routine. This happens on Fridays, with the kindergarten classes, when the children are taken from the Extension to the outdoor space at the main building of the school, and with the 2- and 3-year-olds, occasionally.

The daily playtime is the moment that teachers use to rest. Although the need for a few minutes of rest during an exhausting work shift as an Early Childhood Education teacher is understandable, the choice of this break, on this occasion, demonstrates the place that free play has in the institution, reflecting a modern, colonial, capitalist, adultcentric conception that play, being a specifically childish activity, is not very relevant, as it opposes the logic of work/market.

By positioning free play as an activity that doesn't require the presence of teachers, the school disregards its importance in children's education and as a manifestation of their ways of being, living and learning. Teachers accompanying children's play enables them to learn about who they are, their desires, fears, knowledge and difficulties, contributing, as Vera ^{Bacelar (2009}, p. 58) states, to making “better decisions in their pedagogical practice” (translated by the authors). In addition, these moments enable teachers to assume decolonial positions, by relating to the children at a time governed by them, thus helping the adult to exercise a non-adultcentric position and the children to experience a turn of position in their relationship with the adult in charge of their education.

2. Colonial attitudes of teachers/educators

One of the main colonial aspects found in schools is linked to the adult-child relationship. Adultcentrism in education seeks to suffocate children's protagonism, as it is “based on assumptions created by adults, labelling and normalizing children's productions, behaviors and languages” (Santiago and ^{Faria, 2015}, p. 74, translated by the authors). Despite this, children resist these impositions and mobilize multiple strategies and languages to build and express their perspectives and ways of being in the world.

However, the permanence of adultcentric attitudes in pedagogical practices ultimately compromises this movement of child affirmation, since it denies children the possibility of being recognized as competent subjects, capable of interpreting, questioning and transforming the world around them.

During the observation at the institution, some colonial-adultcentric approaches were perceived, which are briefly described below.

This sort of attitude, which sought to control the children's actions, occurred significantly during the research. One example: a group of children arrive to play, Peu⁵ runs off to the playground toy called park⁶ (it seemed that they had made an agreement in class with the teacher that they would not go to this playground toy), an Educator starts shouting: “- Peu! Peu!”. She adds grumbling: “How tiring Peu is, you see”. She continues: “Peu, if you stay there, I'll be there to get you out”. Her voice gets even louder: “Peu, come down!”. She approaches the playground toy and, slamming her sandals on the floor, says very vehemently: “- Get down, Peu!!! Come on, get down, Peu!!!”

There were also threats and punishments that involved children not taking part in play in the playground, having their toys taken away, not going outdoors or being grounded by sitting down.

This kind of attitude demonstrates how adultcentrism restrains children's ways of playing, moving and acting in the world, according to what the adult thinks is most convenient and appropriate. This promotes a colonial Early Childhood Education, or in the terms used by ^{Schlesener (2021}, p. 423), an education with a “repressive perspective”, which presents itself as “a form of training for a certain behavior” (translated by the authors), using rewards or punishments.

The presence of the park close rule for children 2 and 3 years old was a way of preventing them from playing in the playground toy that required the teachers to be more attentive and closer to them. Therefore, the children were allowed to play in that playground toy for a few minutes, usually for around 5 to 10 minutes. After that time, the teachers used to say: “The playground is closed”. This expression meant that the children could no longer play there.

There is a centrality of the adult revealed in the existence of such a rule, since it is related to what is most convenient and comfortable for the educators. It is a kind of posture that seeks to adapt children, from Early Childhood Education onwards, to the interests of adults (^{Schlesener, 2021}). One of the main characteristics of colonial-adultcentric pedagogical approach is the refusal to accept children as social actors who have the right to make choices, not even respecting their choices when they are playing “freely”.

Other prohibitions surrounded the moment of free play, most of which demonstrate the adult's fear of the children injuring themselves and the educators' desire to sit back and watch from a certain distance. In this context, adults are those who hold power, who command, order and must be obeyed. Children are the ones who must follow orders without question, “before adults who have the power to command, reward, punish, classify - this is a power relationship that is exercised through daily practices which operate on the body and on desires” (^{Oliveira, 2015}, p. 145, translated by the authors).

It is necessary to analyze the manner and reason for depriving children, because “an extreme emphasis on supposed vulnerability can be used by the more powerful segments as a pretext for silencing and marginalizing children” (^{Qvortrup 2014}, p. 34, translated by the authors). Imposing rules to reduce exploitations perceived as dangerous is easier than accompanying children closely, helping them overcome difficulties and guiding them through the necessary precautions so that they don't get hurt.

3. Children's colonial postures.

Sometimes children challenge and resist adultcentric coloniality, as observed in the research⁷, but the adult-child power relationship in Early Childhood Education is very unequal, so that boys and girls often reproduce the teachers' colonial postures and support this type of imposition on their peers, as observed during the research.

There were reproductions of the teachers' colonial postures by the children. The children reminded their classmates of what the teachers had ordered, as a way of restraining them in their actions, such as: “- Auntie⁸ said the playground is closed”, “- Auntie said you can't do...”.

On some occasions, they repeated the classifications given by the educators to their classmates, according to whether they were behaving in the desired way or not, such as, for example, in a play situation with a child I said: “Vin's a good guy, right Vin?”. A classmate joined the conversation: “- He's disobedient,” and added: “- But auntie has already talked to him.” I asked: “- Why did auntie speak to him?”. The child replied: “- Because he was messing up”. The adult custom of classifying children into those who obey and those who disobey is now used by the children themselves.

Another way in which the children reproduced the colonial attitudes of their teachers was by referring to prohibitions as a means of repressing their classmates. Here are some examples:

A girl was playing on a swing, another child came up to her, put the hands on the waist and said: “- What did your father say, Gab?”.

In another circumstance, a child was kicking the ball hard, so that it rose to a height that the teacher found inappropriate, which led her to take the ball from the child. A few minutes later, another boy was holding the ball, as the teacher had given it to him. The child from whom the teacher had taken the ball went up to the boy with the ball and asked to play with him. His classmate replied: “- You were kicking too high!”, using a similar tone to the one used by the teacher a few minutes earlier.

The attitude of snitching on their classmates when they didn't obey an order was very common in the research. The children seemed to understand that this behavior was correct and praiseworthy.

These children's colonial productions have, to some extent, legitimized colonial-adultcentric attitudes. One of the essential strategies of coloniality is the subjugation carried out in such a way that the subjugated person perceives it as natural and appropriate. And this “naturalization is what enables the reproduction of relations of domination” (^{Tonial, Maheirie and Garcia Jr., 2017}, p. 19, translated by the authors).

With the naturalized distribution of power through classifications, even in terms of age (^{Quijano, 2009}), coloniality becomes something that flows through society without many people being aware of the colonial process they are undergoing. In the context of Early Childhood Education, children not only become victims of adultcentric coloniality, but are also manipulated into collaborating with this process. In this way, the legitimization of adultcentric power in Early Childhood Education is a key element in the maintenance and reproduction of coloniality.

Aspects that contribute to the construction of decolonial processes

The research showed the existence of aspects that foster the construction of decolonial processes. Those aspects are linked to space, playtime, the teachers' usual position in the playground, freedom in the relationship with nature and the children's cultural play productions.

It is interesting to notice that some of these dimensions were presented above because they also had colonial aspects, such as the physical distance between teachers and children in the playground. These aspects appear here again because, from other perspectives, they were also decolonial aspects. This shows that, within the same category or positioning, contributions to coloniality can be included, as well as to decoloniality. This dialectic needs to be understood so that decisions regarding children's education can be more conscious of (de)colonial processes.

1. The outdoor space at the institution's main building.

Physical space in Early Childhood Education has a role that goes beyond that of a place where pedagogical work takes place. It is an important element in the constitution of educational activities. For this reason, it is seen by Maria das Graças ^{Horn as a teacher's partner in pedagogical action and “as a curricular element” (Horn, 2003}, p. 48, translated by the authors) and by ^{Lopes and Vasconcellos (2006}) as a factor structuring the construction of childhoods and their cultures. In this context, it was important to analyze the potential of the outdoor play space at the main building of the institution under investigation for the construction of decolonial processes in Early Childhood Education.

During the observation in this space, we realized that it is a propitious factor for the construction of decolonial processes, due to its spaciousness, the natural elements that integrate it and the playful and educational possibilities linked to life in the countryside that it provides.

The spaciousness of this area allows children to move around more freely, to find a place to play without being interrupted by disputes for spaces, and to organize and group themselves more easily. It also enables the children to use the strategy of getting out of the teacher's view to carry out forbidden adventures. On several occasions, we saw the children move away from the teacher's sight to do something they had been forbidden to do. These subversive acts give the children the opportunity to practice decolonial postures.

Since it is made up of many different natural elements, this outdoor space encourages contact with nature. The trees, flowers, earth and sand, sun and wind, birds and insects that live and visit this space make the children's playtime more joyful, creative, connected to organic life and full of possibilities.

Furthermore, this connection with nature opposes the colonial/modern/capitalist conception. Societies that live a more integrated life with the natural environment are pejoratively called primitive, as they distance themselves from the Eurocentric standard. One of the keys to coloniality lies in the perspective of separation between subjects and nature, which should be used in the service of science and should not integrate the ways of life of different societies (Kuhn Junior and Mello, 2020).

Other possibilities of activities can be improved by being held in such a space. Storytelling, games and directed play, conversation circles, moments with music, visual arts, among other activities carried out under trees, can, for example, be encouraged by elements of this environment. On a few occasions these activities were carried out, but as the walled-in atmosphere is quite strong, these activities were occasional.

2. Playground time

The contribution of time to the construction of decolonial processes, as perceived during the research, is partial, for two reasons. Firstly, because this benefit only occurs in the outdoor space at the institution's main building, since in the Extension space the children only spend 15 minutes a day. Secondly, despite the extended time for outdoor play at the institution's main building, it is controlled by the educators.

The idea of compartmentalizing time at school follows the organization of “time as ‘useful’ and free according to the demarcation of industrial society”. Thus, the chronological time for children's play is usually short, with the beginning and the end determined by adults based on a temporal logic opposite to the one of the subjects who play (^{Canda, Soares and Zen, 2018}, p. 429, translated by the authors), in other words, based on an adultcentric logic.

However, when there is more time for this moment, this creates the possibility for the children to engage in many of their playing activities with an appropriate amount of time to their unfolding. It is in this sense that the organization of time in the outdoor space at the institution's main building contributes to decolonial processes. The youngest children, 2 and 3 years old, usually spend around an hour playing in the playground every day. The Extension children, aged 4 and 5, spend the same amount of time only on Fridays, when they go to the main building.

During the observation, we realized that this time allowed the children to construct make-believe plots with beginning, middle and end, to experience different play moments and to explore the playground intensively. The children usually left the playground close to mealtimes and, at this point, some of them were already hungry, which made this exit to wash their hands and eat very welcome for many of them.

3. Physical distance from educators.

The teachers usually sat in a group in the shade of a tree, which prevented them from seeing the whole space. This location allowed the children to carry out their adventures without the intervention of adults. They often went into forbidden spaces, played in ways that the teachers perceived as dangerous and behaved according to their interests without being noticed.

These breaches left by the distance from the teachers provided opportunities for the children to resist adultcentric coloniality. We witnessed several occasions on which the children broke the rules and exercised their decision-making power, based on their own logic, because they were not under the adult's gaze. Decoloniality occurs by means of “the production of spaces for the new social protagonists subalternized by colonization” (^{Faria et al., 2015}, p. 13, translated by the authors). Consequently, even without the educators having this objective, space is being made available to the children in the institution where the research was carried out.

4. Freedom in contact with nature

When we mentioned the possibilities provided by the institution's outdoor space, we referred to the natural elements found there. However, it is not enough for such a space to exist, children must be given the freedom to explore it, because one of the many aspects considered in decolonial Early Childhood Education is the reconnection with nature, rebuilding, as ^{Sauvé (2005}) points out, a sense of belonging to it. To achieve this, children need to be recognized as citizens capable of connecting themselves with the environment, loving, caring for and preserving it. In other words, it is necessary to adopt a decolonial view of children and childhoods.

In the outdoor space of the institution where the research was carried out, the children play freely with sand, with leaves and fruit that fall from the trees, walk barefoot, touch plants and flowers, walk on tree roots, catch insects, most of the time without any impediment. During the research, it became clear how experiences in that space brought a special connection with nature: the admiration of the flowers; the enchantment of following the paths of the ants and listening to the birds singing.

5. Children's playful cultural productions.

All these aspects - space, time, the teachers' usual position in the playground, freedom with nature - provide opportunities for the children's playful cultural productions. These children's cultures are composed of understandings, feelings and actions that are peculiar to boys and girls. In this process, children test different forms of social relations, create strategies to protect their play from invasion - whether by adults or other children -, produce a series of meanings about their abilities and potential, which contribute to the construction of childhoods that oppose coloniality. As ^{Corsaro (2011}, p. 181) explains, “children try to gain control of their lives in various ways” (translated by the authors).

Make-believe play allows children to resist coloniality “through the unique, creative and often critical interpretations” (^{Sarmento, 2002}, p. 16, (translated by the authors) they make of social roles. The cultures of the children at the Institution investigated allowed them to exercise creativity and autonomy to assume different roles and to use the available elements in unconventional ways when playing house in the roots of trees in the roles of mothers, fathers and children, when making their own food using the elements of nature, when decorating their cakes, when holding birthday parties and when digging to find treasures.

Other cultures produced intensely by children were associated with adventure and challenge plays, a term we used to refer to plays that involved jumping, running, kicking, climbing, scaling and descending. It was in these activities that children's ludic cultures most expressed themselves as decolonial strategies, as they challenged what was imposed as limits through small, insubordinate actions.