Babies’ relationships with each other, crying and teaching at daycare

Abstract

In this paper, we present how babies’ crying permeates encounters with their peers, influencing their interactions, actions and manifestations simultaneously. The theoretical-methodological framework of the Network of Meanings articulated with the studies of Early Childhood Education and Historical-Cultural Psychology supported our analyses. The data analyzed and presented in this paper come from a doctoral research with a qualitative approach, which aimed to understand how babies’ crying interferes with educational-pedagogical relationships developed in a municipal school of early childhood education (EMEI) in the city of Belo Horizonte, in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Based on participant observation and film footage made in an EMEI nursery class studied in 2017, we identified how babies’ crying presents itself as an element that triggers simultaneous meetings and disagreements between babies and their peers. These quick meetings generally took place during times in which the babies weren´t in direct interactions with the teachers. Thus, we affirm that babies, through their actions, modify their own environment and transform it, enabling meetings, disagreements, and games with their peers. Therefore, it is important that teaching at daycare ensures spaces and times for these interactions between babies and consider their expressions, especially crying