Children’s cultures and artistic practices: children as critical and competent social authors

Abstract

This article analyses how participating children produce their own interpretations of the artistic experience they live through, exploring the relationships between children’s cultures, symbolic production and social authorship. The study adopts a qualitative ethnographic approach with children. Fieldwork was conducted between February 2020 and March 2021 within the Social Project Piá Professora Maria Aparecida Mollo Jorge, located in the municipality of Itambé, in southern Brazil, involving 17 children aged between seven and twelve. Data production included participant observation, field notes, audiovisual records and the use of the participatory draw-and-talk technique, through which children produced individual and collective drawings about what they imagined as the “Choir of Dreams”. The findings show that children not only participate in artistic practices but also produce critical interpretations of rehearsal spaces, forms of performance and participation dynamics within the musical group. The representations created reveal children’s own conceptions of freedom, artistic creation and recognition as artists. By highlighting these dynamics, the study reinforces the need to recognise children not only as social actors but also as critical and competent social authors, capable of interpreting, imagining and transforming the cultural contexts in which they participate. The results contribute to the advancement of research in the Social, Cultural and Artistic Studies of Childhood, particularly regarding the analysis of children’s cultures and the artistic practices produced by children themselves.