1. Introduction

By accident, and sometimes on the brink of an accident, I find myself writing without seeing. Not with my eyes closed, to be sure, but open and disoriented in the night; or else during the day, my eyes fixed on something else, while looking elsewhere (...) (^{Derrida, 2010}, p. 11).

The epigraph we use to start this text is part of the work “Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins” by Jacques ^{Derrida (2010)} and will help us compose, together with Clarice Lispector’s writings in Agua Viva¸the pathway of this text that intends to problematize how curricula have been produced with childhood, starting from the Derridian ideal of experience and happening. In this sense, writing blindly, at night, or dodging the gaze from the rigidity of the paper and the pre-determined path, presents itself as a possibility of not knowing exactly what will come, because faced with this experience of “unseen” there is a gap between the intention and the gesture, between idea and shape, as what escapes control. However, it is not blindless as a mistake, but as a condition of creation, which in each trace makes something new emerge. In this way, we dare to think of the curriculum for childhood as an event, an unpredictability, a scape.

In Água Viva, a book by Clarice, first published in 1973, the author commits herself with the words as a fourth dimension, free from the limits of an orthodox narrative struct, Clarice flirts, plays, interacts with the reader from a continuous flow of words.

You don’t understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body. When you come to read me you will ask why I don’t keep to painting and my exhibitions, since I write so rough and disorderly. It’s because now I feel the need for words-and what I’m writing is new to me because until now my true word has never been touched. The word is my fourth dimension (Linspector, 2019, p. 11).

And the child, which is her fourth dimension? Play? The child, as Lispector, is not restricted to playing with the body, with the word, with the possibilities of being in a world that seeks to dialogue with her, that interacts with her not taking it as a given, but as created, a deconstructive gesture that, challenging the world’s order, open possibilities for other meanings. The child plays a game that unstable her, in a constant deferral that shows that the meaning might be different. Playing and interacting, opening to be affected by what the other provokes, in the meeting with the “power or the vulnerability of/with the other"(^{Almeida, 2018}, p.120).

As Clarice, in this text, we dare, through words, to seek possibilities of thinking and defending curriculum as experience. In the path chosen is one that sees poetry in the everyday life of school, which is not concerned with the order of the facts, but that seeks in them and from them a dialogue with the many possibilities that emerge from the interactions and plays with/of children. About this, we also turn our gaze on how Brazilian curriculum policies have been using the power of plays and interaction, proposing that these are taken as structuring axes of Childhood Education curriculum.

The Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais para a Educação Infantil/DCNEI [National Curriculum Guidelines for Early Childhood Education] already established that:

The pedagogical practices that compose the curriculum proposal of Early Childhood Education should have as guiding axes the interactions and plays, articulating knowledge and experiences that promote children’s full development (^{Brasil, 2009}, p. 15).

A perspective reinforced in the Base Nacional Comum Curricular [Common National Curriculum Framework] (2018) which recognizes play as a privileged form of children’s expression, knowledge, and relationship with the world, when stressing that:

The interactions and the plays, structuring axes of the curriculum proposal, are fundamental to guarantee experiences that promote children’s right to learn in significant contexts (p. 39).

However, we have been observing how the idea of learning and teaching has been the tonic of these proposals, since childhood, seeking the development of abilities and competencies within a perspective of measured quality.

Not disregarding the power of plays and interaction, we intend to shake the notions of plays and interactions that have been used by policies, disturbing the statements that, when establishing play as structuring, eclipse play when focusing on the final meaning of play, valuing the “teaching while playing”, “not noticing learning”, and as something possible to be measured. We argued in favor of play as experience and event, as opening and unpredictability, which blurs and questions fixed senses, pre-established products. In this text, we advocate a broader perspective for interactions and plays, understanding that adults and children produce culture, knowledge, interact, and, mainly in an institutional space that welcomes children, produce curriculum to the same extent.

From this perspective, we question how childhoods have been taken as dispute instances through the curricula, when projecting, on the one hand, fixed meanings for children and the curriculum and, on the other, potentializing curricula made with childhoods that make difference emerge. What can be thought about the curriculum to/for childhoods? Which curricula has been produced with and/or for childhoods? How does school answer these calls for otherness?

In another passage from Água Viva, Clarice tells us:

(...) I can still reason - I studied mathematics, which is the madness of reason - but now I want the plasma - I want to eat straight from the placenta. I am a little scared: scared of surrendering completely because the next instant is unknown. The next instant, do I make it? or does it make itself? We make it together with our breath. And with the flair of the bullfighter in the ring (^{Lispector, 2019}, p. 2).

This writing, crossed by the act of deciding to think about school from the poetic, the inventive, the deconstruction, and the event that is built as giving oneself to the next unknown instance, which is built together. ^{Derrida (2012)} when stating that “the measure of the event's possibility is given by its impossibility” (p.239) invites us to this this unknown in the context of human relationships from the singularity of the event, with the easiness of a bullfighter in the ring always expecting the unusual, the unpredictable.

From the dialogue with Clarice Lispector and Derrida, we propose a debate on the interactions and plays as constitutive elements of Early Childhood Education curriculum, as an impossible possibility, as an event, unknown, as unpredictability. As something that arrives, the event is also what cannot be understood, so that ^{Derrida (2012)} presents it as a movement of some type of appropriation that intends to understand, recognize, interpret…while pointing out that its understanding presupposes that such an appropriation is always flawed, not sufficient. (^{Amancio, 2019})

In Memoirs of the Blind, ^{Derrida (2010)}, provokes us to think about the possibility of blind writing:

What happens when one writes without seeing? A hand of the blind ventures forth alone or disconnected, in a poorly delimited space; it feels its way, it gropes, it caresses as much as it inscribes, trusting in the memory of signs and supplementing sight. It is as if the lidless eye had opened at the tip of the fingers, as if one eye too many had just grown right next to the nail, a single eye, the eye of a cyclops or one-eyed man. This eye guides the tracing or outline [tracé]; it is a miner’s lamp at the point of writing, a curious and vigilant substitute, the prothesis of a seer who is himself invisible. The image of the movement of these letters, of what this finger eye inscribes, is thus sketched out within me. From the absolute withdrawal of an invisible center or command post, a secret power ensures from a distance a kind of synergy. It coordinates the possibilities of seeing, touching, and moving. And of hearing and understanding, for these are already words of the blind that I draw in this way (p. 11/12).

What happens when one writes without seeing? Also in the curriculum that is written unseen, which is not open to be seen before it takes place and that makes itself up in the meeting of the subjects, similar to the ventures of a blind person’s hand, willing to create amidst uncertainty, despite the political, curricular, and pedagogical projects, despite the regulations, despite the desires. Thus, “...it inscribes, trusting in the memory of signs and supplementing sight. It is as if the lidless eye had opened at the tip of the fingers...” - as a supplement, we allude to the curriculum not as a seeing prescription, but as something built through touch, voice, sensitive listening, meeting, interactions, plays, and the whole body…as Lispector warns us.

The meeting between Derrida and Lispector enables us to question the curriculum thought as literature and philosophy, blurring borders, a question proposed by Derrida, who rejects the dualism grounded in a system of oppositions. Thus, by his indication, we should by attention that “[…] there is an infinite task of deconstruction: it is necessary to draw on the heritage and its memory for the conceptual tools that allow one to challenge the limits that this heritage has imposed up to now” (^{Derrida, 2004}, p.31). Hence, in the dialogue we propose between Derrida and Lispector, we grope the possibilities to fecundate the curriculum space around experience, a recurrent concept in the production of curriculum policies and that has its meaning under dispute, in which we place ourselves by defending a notion of experience as event.

In this text, we take the risk of writing as opening, as an event and not a closed plan. Therefore, the analysis undertook here does not follow a linear path or compartmentalized between theory and practice. We oscillate, on purpose, between the two facets of investigation: on the one hand, the critical examination of curriculum documents for Early Childhood Education, specially the DCNEI (^{Brasil, 2009}) and the BNCC (^{Brasil, 2018}); on the other, the experience of children’s play that emerge from daily interactions as a power of invention and questioning of norms. Far from considering them as isolated objects or opposite poles, we assume a movement of blurring the frontiers between the empirical and the documental, between the experienced and the prescribed, as an epistemological and political gesture.

In this sense, we took the path, from the theoretical-methodological entanglement aligned to the post-foundational, discursive and deconstructive-inspired perspectives we mobilize, of an investigative posture that removes us from the safety of already-established methodological procedures and calls us to a composition in which, as ^{Ranniery (2018}, p.982), we consider the “resources and artifacts of qualitative investigation less as something methodological and more as a yarn ball of ethical-political questions[...]”.

Hunted by the questions of ^{St. Pierre (2018}, p.1053) - “After all, what can one do with post-structuralist theory in an empirical study?”, we search for pathways to not perpetuate a disconnection between theory and methodology. Hence, we did not opt for one or another center of analysis, but by ambivalence as a possibility of reverberating meanings, opening gaps for policies and practices. Such as the writing without seeing evoked by ^{Derrida (2010)}, our proposal relies on the uncertainty and the power of what escapes and in a curriculum built in the vibration between what is established and what is to come. By doing so, we open space to think other curriculum possibilities, which do not eliminate the unpredictability of the encounter, but that welcome it as a constitutive dimension of teaching.

2. Interactions and plays: the secret harmony of the disharmony in curriculum documents

The secret harmony of disharmony: I don't want something already made but something still being tortuously made. My unbalanced words are the wealth of my silence (^{Lispector, 2019}, p. 5).

As Clarice, we dive into this writing because we deeply want to talk about the crossings and experiences proposed by teachers-researchers in childhoods. In a political, reflexive, formative insertion that makes us question: How and why do children play? To what measure do we surrender ourselves to the “aveuglement” of plays beyond the experience that blurs the opposition pair visible/invisible? What do we (not) see when children interact and invite us to play? As a non-predictable experience, interactions and plays are not made, they happen in the secret harmony of disharmony; in the dispute for toys, the negotionations in structured and symbolic games, in the interactions with adults and children and in the ceaseless possibility of signification, as ^{Benjamin (2002)} states:

A child wants to pull something, and so he becomes a horse; he wants to play with sand, and so he turns into a baker; he wants to hide, and so he turns into a robber or a policeman. We are also familiar with a number of ancient playthings that were presumably once cult objects but that scorn the function of masks: balls, hoops, tops, kitesauthentic playthings; “the more authentic, the less they meant to adults”. (p.76-77).

Interactions and plays, immersed in the “secret harmony of disharmony”, approximate us to children’s universe and reconfigure our perceptions on play and its possibilities. The moments of play uninstall adults’ certainties and open possibilities for the tension between the visible and the invisible, what is here and the not-here, always building new senses.

Resuming the (DCNEI, 2009), article 9 defines the interactions and plays as structuring axes of Education and defines children as:

Historical subjects with rights that, in the interactions, relationships, and everyday practices they experience, build their personal and collective identity, play, imagine, fantasies, wishes, learns, observes, experiences, narrates, questions, and builds meaning about nature and society, producing culture. (^{Brasil, 2009}).

BNCC (2018), as previously discussed, ratifies the importance of maintaining such structuring axes added by six learning rights, which are: socialize, play, participate, explore, express, and know oneselfwhich guarantee the conditions for children to learn through an active role in the environments that invite them to experience challenges and can build meanings about themselves, others, and the social and natural world.

The guidelines and documents that conduct Early Childhood Education reaffirm the importance of some aspects in these dynamics of constructing identity and culture, and invite us to reflect about the relevance of educational environments that promote freedom and creativity in the learning process. The plays and interactions, more than elements of children’s everyday life, are, thus, forms of expression, of questioning, and reinvention of the world- for children and for us, adults who are willing to listen to what emerges from them in every gesture, word, and game.

Having plays and interactions as axes, BNCC (2018), defends that:

This conception of child as the one who observes, questions, raises hypothesis, concludes, judges, assimilates values, builds knowledge and appropriates the systematized knowledge through action and in the interactions with the physical and social world should not result in the confinement of these types of learning to a process of natural and spontaneous development. On the contrary, there is a need to imprint an educational intentionality to the pedagogical practices in Early Childhood education, in kindergarten and preschool.

This intentionality consists in the organization and proposition by the educator of experiences that enable children to know themselves and the other, and to know and understand the relationships with nature, with culture, and with the scientific production, which are translated in the practice of personal care (eat, dress, and clean oneself), in the plays and experimentations with varied materials, and in the approximation with literature, and the meeting with people. (^{BRASIL, 2018}, p.36-37).

What aligns with the notion of experience inferred from BNCC

Considering that, in Early Childhood Education, the different types of learning and children’s development have interactions and playing as structuring axes, guaranteeing them the rights of sociability, playing, participating, exploring, expressing and knowing themselves, the curriculum organization of Early Childhood Education at BNCC is structured into five experience fields in the scope of which are defined the learning and development objectives (^{Brasil, 2018}, p. 38).

The previous definition of experience is established in its direct association with action that aims the development of specific abilities and knowledge, which emphasizes what is criticized by Derrida as the “experience of”.

In Early Childhood Education, the essential learnings encompass behaviors, abilities, and knowledge, as well as experiences that promote learning and development in several fields of experience, always considering interactions and playing as structuring axes. Therefore, these learnings are objectives of learning and development (^{Brasil, 2018}, p.41 original highlights).

Plays and interactions seem captured by a prescriptive logic that place them as possibilities to access a reality closed on itself. The prevalence of a logic that signifies experience as predictable, aligned to objectives and abilities that guarantee learning, eclipses unpredictability, and the experience with the other that arrives with no warning. It also establishes, tacitly, binaries in the duality intentionality/unpredictability, objective/contingence, certainty/uncertainty, repetition/difference (...)

This understanding of experience ends up inferring senses about the idea of play and interaction that, in a discursive articulation with the defense of educational intentionality in the actions developed with children, become means to reach learning objectives, undermining the inventiveness of plays as singular experiences that are powers going beyond…

We should point out that our argument does not intent to invalidate the idea of educational intentionality, under the risk of excessive spontaneity or emptying the pedagogical action - it is not a question of one or another or an unproductive polarization that does not allow facing the tensions. What we highlight is how the idea of intentionality, associated with other significations observed in these policies, produce a discursive arrangement that overpowers the senses of what is established as a structuring axis -plays and interactions - submitting it to the force of this idea. Resuming the dialogue with Derrida’s (2010) work, which follows us in this reflection, if plays and interactions invite us to write without seeing, their signification in the curriculum policies demand visibility and clarity that seek the precision in this writing.

About the work “Memoirs of the Blind”,^{Ponzio (2019)} points out that any type of writing, verbal or non-verbal, is used to delineate the limits in the shadow. In this sense, the author highlights that philosophy, as a writing in the shadow, counterposes one of the most important myths, through which Western philosophy represents itself: Plato’s myth of the cavern. On it, the philosopher frees himself from the bonds to directly access things, rehabituating his eyes to the light. In another direction, she explains that Derrida will subvert this logic subjacent to the search for truth when stating that our access to the “real” will always be indirect, as writing does not emerge in the direct relationship with things: “ Writing, the philosophical or artistic writing, emerges from the absence, from what is no longer, and what does not exist yet.” (p.125).

In this movement that believes to be impossible to directly access things, recognizing the power of interactions and plays as writing in the shadow, we argue about the senses mobilized by policies that seek to fixate meaning to play, as a starting point for an end, as a calculated and predictable movement that wants to untie the bonds and access the light as a guide and direct play beyond what we believe to be its actually power: that of creation, a committed opening to otherness as a perspective.

When going over the curriculum documents as writings of meanings that seek to delimitate, organize, and guide the practices with childhoods, we recognize the tensions that emerge when these texts aim to shape what we see as movement, thus, what we present in this text is not a second movement, different and isolated, but the continuous unfolding of what already reverberates in the policies and is (re)inscribed in the gestures, bodies, and encounters with children. Therefore, when moving from the documental analysis to the experiences with childhoods, we do not establish stagnated territories but assume the blurring of frontiers as an ethical and political posture.

In this midway between what is prescribed and what escapes it, we follow the line of experience as an event. A curriculum that is not over in the regulations but is composed in the vibration between what is established and the unpredictable, between the visibility of the letter and the invisibility of the gesture. Next, we let the experiences speak, not as examples of what was said, but as ways to enlarge the meanings and tension the limits of what does not intend to be fixed.

3. Some remarks to continue the debate...

I write in signs that are more a gesture than voice. All this is what I got used to painting, delving into the intimate nature of things. But now the time to stop painting has come in order to remake myself, I remake myself in these lines. I have a voice. As I throw myself into the line of my drawing, this is an exercise in life without planning. The world has no visible order and all I have is the order of my breath. I let myself happen. (^{Lispector, 2019}, p. 15)

There are many senses that overflow as discourse about the experiences. Children talk about their experiences, be them socially and culturally “authorized” or not. Children live different childhoods and how is it possible to get closer to them when we subtract these differences? It is impossible to be with them and not allow ourselves to listen what they have to say, without being able to listen to the silences, to enter and observe plays and different forms of interaction. Thus, the experiences shared here are not intended to fixate meanings, they were an attempt to remember contexts, prospecting new presents, singular events that write, without seeing, other curricula with childhoods.

In this pathway of reflection and writing, intertwined with Clarice Lispector’s poetics and Derrida’s deconstructive gesture, we revised children’s interactions and plays as unpredictable events, as experiences that escape the attempt to run away, which makes us advocate for the curriculum as an experience that happens, among other things, in the plays and interactions. School, thus, becomes a space of encounters, negotiations, and experiences that are always new.

One should mistrust types of knowledge that are defined a priori and recognize the power of looking children and childhoods, as well as the experiences of play and, therefore, the curriculum as event. And what do we do with what reaches us? About this challenging process, ^{Abramowicz and Tebet (2017)} defend that we need to think education, children, and childhood from other bases; from differences, as this childhood we constantly try to gasp resists and escapes us, in an endless movement of reinvention.

The experiences narrated, far from being simple descriptions, organize themselves as possibilities to evoke the power of play as a founding act, as a field open to invention and alterity. When recognizing the different childhoods that inhabit school, we open ourselves to unlock pathways to perceive that the subjects build themselves in the intertwining of differences. How can we make the school a place to exchange experiences and share meanings? Hence, play reveals itself as an act that escapes, that remakes itself, and that invites us to a constant exercise of listening, attention, and openness to the unknown.

Thinking about childhood as an event implies recognizing the multiple experiences that cross children in their different contexts. It is not about fixating meanings, but being available to listen, observe, and understand the ways through which children express and build themselves in the world. Thus, school can be a living place for exchanges and sharing, where sensitive listening and the recognition of differences enable new possibilities of existing and learning. After all, as Clarice Lispector reminds us, the world has no visible order - in breathing, in movement, in events, in happenings, the experience is continually made and remade.

In this sense, throughout this text, we moved between two dimensions: the analysis of curriculum documents and the attentive listening of children’s experiences in their interactions and plays. We methodologically chose to separate them, though not intending to delineate rigid frontiers between theory and practice, policy and experience, norm and gesture. On the contrary, we sought to reveal how these dimensions are interconnected and mutually reinforced.

DCNEI and BNCC are shown as regulation instruments that, simultaneously, recognize the importance of play and interactions and tend to capture them through prescriptive logics, aligned with the rationality of predictability and measurement. The experiences lived in the body, the listening, and the encounter leak through the gaps, revealing that play and interaction do not fit the frame of what was foreseen. They point towards a curriculum that is made in the in-between, in the instant, in the difference that emerges. In this displacement, between the established and what insists on escaping, we advocate a curriculum as event, as one that is not closed within the rules, but is constantly reconfigured in the singular experiences of children and their educators. A curriculum that does not intend to be complete, closed or guaranteed, but that pulsates as a Derrida’s gesture of blind writing or Clarice Lispector’s uninterrupted flow of words; both teach us that there is something that escapes us, something that resists, something that (re)starts.

We end this text aware that this is not the end of the reflections emerged here. On the contrary, they continue in movement, unfolding themselves in new questions, concerns, and discoveries. As Clarice reminds us, “what I say to you is never what I say to you but something else instead. ". Maybe it is exactly in this in-between, this space between what is said and not-said, between what is seen and not-seen, where the power of interactions and children’s plays lie: as gestures that reinvent existence and draw new ways of being and learning in the world.