“Colégio Nacional” is an environment of learning placed in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, Brasil. In 2016, this educational institution reaches its mature stage, completing 30 years of work devoted to high quality education and committed with our time, our place and our people.

With care and respect for the various stages of the human being development, the institution, through its Pedagogical Nucleus, rethought its teacher training cycles and proposed a new didactic and a new methodology that could propitiate the accompaniment of their students in their specificity, differences and singularities.

There is not a way to develop a critic and participative subject, a moral and intellectually independent person, men and women historically inserted in their time and place, nor construct a citizen focused on a common good, if in their educative processes it is not assured the human needs, the potentialities and difficulties that “WE” pass through during the transformation process. Looking over the “human”, before looking over the pedagogical, turned into the premise and object of the interventions on the teaching-learning process of all our students.

Assuring the goals of our educational program, our teachers created four different projects. The “ME” Project, focused on Childhood Education, with the aim of granting the kids the processes of construction of their personal identity; the Project “ME IN...”, dedicated to the first stage of Elementary School is focused on building a feeling of “belonging” and on valuing the local culture. The Project “ME WITH...”, directed to the second part of Elementary School, searches for an interactive partnership, the sustainability and the protections of regional and local spaces. And finally, the Project “ME FOR” is directed to High School students that will become propositional and sensitive students to the national problems and necessities, by means of broadening the acquired knowledge.

The educational projects, developed through active methodologies and formative evaluation processes, find on learning expectations the possibility of developing cognitive skills, specific skills important to reasoning, communication and language. Moreover, they promote the appropriation of the learning contents which will allow the understanding about several areas of knowledge in their specific natures.

CHILDHOOD EDUCATION.... NOT CHILDHOOD TEACHING

The National Basis and Guidelines (LDB–Lei de Diretrizes e Bases) and the National Curriculum Basis for Childhood Education, which regulate the Brazilian educational guidelines, point out the necessity of breaking with welfarist practices that have marked the history of the Brazilian children for a long time. These documents define the child as a historical subject with their own rights; a child who plays, imagines, fantasizes, desires, learns, watches, experiences, narrates, questions and builds senses over the nature and over the society, producing culture.

These guidelines mobilized the researchers of our school to search for theoretical frameworks that could consolidate this premise and help them with the “reconstruction” of our educators thinking. The researchers found inspiration in the “Pedagogy of Listening” and in some educational practices founded in the city of Reggio Emilia, in Italy.

The “Hundred Languages of Children” [4] became the indicator of the pedagogical practices of our teachers who from the children prefiguration or ideas started to elaborate projections of the spaces where they interact and relate, documenting the tasks with videos, images, drawings or texts.

The kindergarten of national (public) school is not just a physical space for the performance of daily activities. It is a place of the formation of internal culture of a child, his/her spiritual values and the high ethical principles of a growing adult. In kindergarten there is respect to the lives of children and their families. There are always “attentive ears” to children’s needs. We as pedagogues and supervising adults must know children’s opinions, beliefs, myths and fears.

Here we should speak about the inter-relations, about the personal and collective commitment that compose overall responsibility of children and adults. We believe that children are prepared for general and moral education and they can always use their great potential based on psychological functions that they have developed to the date. Children can be powerful in their actions; they can be creative and courageous in their perceptions.

Children and educators come in a tight and constant interaction during education and extra-curricular activities, and it is important for adults to understand and properly apply the basics of the communication theory [6]. Indeed, children are just forming their communicative skills and developing the platform for interpersonal relations that will be used for collective work within school classes and for the formation informal groups.

Children come from families with different ethnic, social, cultural backgrounds. This is especially true not only due to the globalization of modern society, but also because the society of Brazil, which is a federal state, is composed by diverse multicultural and multilingual groups. The emerging field of pedagogy, ethnopedagogy [6], can help educators in these country solve urgent problems of providing the universal and equal education to all children, while supporting their personalities and developing their unique talents.

It has been proven by the history of multicultural nations that it is important that ndividuals respect their origin, their own history, which includes the history of their family, their community and their country. Individuals who respect themselves and their spiritual values will be subsequently more respectful and patient towards others with their own cultural values. It is impossible to know the history of others without knowing our own history. We know that this was a root for many social conflicts, therefore, if one respect oneself it is easier for him/her to understand the others.

Without realizing that the human society is composed of individuals who differ in their views, experiences, and attitudes, and without deep respect for these personal differences, including beliefs, habits, and cultures, we cannot lay the path towards the humanisitcally equal society and cannot hope for the collective work. Thus, the “There is a Way (Tem Jeito Sim)” programme, through the “Me With (Eu Com)” project and the discipline of “Science and Citizenship (Ciência e Cidadania)”, aims at achieving the autonomy of persons involved in the creation of knowledge, and therefore at strengthening the teacher-student relationships that form a collaborative partnership within this framework.

The children started to compose a learning community, which along with their pairs, their teachers and the school staff participate on the elaboration of knowledge and experiences from the school and family daily life.

The teacher becomes now a provocative agent of learning situations through a careful listening that is also inspired by stimulation to dialogue, relationship and participation. The teacher’s intervention is significant to build meanings, helping the children to propose an idea, shape it as a hypothesis and try it as a proper idea. The teacher’s function becomes more that of a questioning agent instead of a facilitating one. By means of a careful listening, the teacher documents processes, discusses situations, prepares images and contexts, reanimates relevant situations, analyzes behaviors and participates of the contexts production.

The detailed study of these processes has been done at primary school by L.V. Zankov [5]. He investigated theoretical ideas of L.S. Vygotsky on educational psychology [9] by the means of the large-scale pedagogical experiment at schools [10]. Its results were then used to develop a comprehensive system of developmental education, which significantly improved the quality of elementary school education.

The curriculum developed by the Childhood Education professionals break limits and starts to depict the daily routine through the creation of meanings about what happens around the children. It is not settled in pre-defined actions, subject to reproductions without analysis or reflections.

The projections created by the teachers are configured in flexible planning with initial hypothesis about groups of children, been subject to changes and modifications during the process. They are very different from the programs that are built on plans based on pre-defined curriculums, official programs or impersonal stages of global development.

There is no need to show ready-made concepts to the child who does not know yet his/her possibilities and have the need to find out the undiscovered. It is knowledge built from inside out, sewed from the neuro connections, which associates, discriminates, empowers and discovers new operating structures. These developing processes create the child’s psyche that will underline his/her personality as an adult [7].

The Experience Fields determined on our national law, guide these projections preserving the specificities of children until six on the following axes: a) “me”, “the other” and “us”; b) body, gestures and movements; c) the listening, the speaking, the thought and the imagination; d) lines, sounds, colors and images; e) spaces, time, quantities, relations and transformations. They contribute not only to guide an instructor but also to point out precious indicators about abilities poorly explored or even neglected by the teachers.

The nature, embraced in its magnitude, joins the learning moments providing noticeable phenomena to the students, who create theories from their perceptions. Nothing is presented, everything is received, nothing is stated, everything is questioned, nothing is ready yet, but everything is ready to be built.

There is a brain plasticity which is developed from the relations stablished among the children, the children and the social and physical environment, the children and themselves, because knowledge is not linear and it needs both emotional and cognitive interactions.

It is in respect to the maturing processes, both neural and affective, that occupies the senses, the perceptions and the feelings searching for answers and meanings. They need to encounter contradictions that point out the right and the wrong, the good and the evil, the personal and the collective, the struggle, the agreement, the competitions.

The individuality and the collectivity in this educational purpose allow us to wonder about the differences and singularities and the need of a careful look over the creeds and stablished values. The agreements, rules, determinations and routines tend to be created in favor of a common good.

The physical space on this proposal acts like a third educator provoking the students to take a stance in front of objects, situations, relations and contexts, inspiring the establishment of a connection between the cognitive, the affective and the psychomotor. The meeting with the environment creates the desire and the intention.

The visual aesthetic arrangement along with the organization of space makes awakening to the sensibility, to the beauty, the homely and the caring. The osmotic function supported in its structure grants the flow from the inside out and from the outside in, in every room of our school.

The dimensions of the caring and the educating intertwine in this Project ensure essential rights to children like coexist, play, participate, explore, communicate, self-knowing, feed, rest and other hundreds of rights that only that who owns “hundreds of languages” is able to have.

There is no routine, but the daily life in school provides significant learning situations for both educators and children. We tend, this way, to value what is real, what can be a daily experience. Kids feel, touch, try, do, relate, explore what is around to learn about themselves and learn the world they live in. There is appreciation of the children main role and its authorship as well of the work in small groups and the collective and cooperative work.

The gathering of data, the organization and comprehension of the documents during the educational experience will constitute the assessment process of the Childhood Education which being incorporated into the daily practice of teachers will make possible the collective meeting and the progress of investigations, analysis and reflections. The dialogues with the children will be the basis to the self-assessment as well as the individual and group assessments.

Inspired on Piaget’s psychogenetic conceptions, on Vygotsky’s historical and cultural conception, on Brunner’s learning theory [3], on Malaguzzi’s “The Hundred Languages” [4] and on Ausubel’s meaningful learning theory [1], the “Me” Project for Childhood Education of Colégio Nacional attempts to grant children’s rights through the access to the processes of appropriation, renovation and articulation of knowledge and the knowing.

The kids from Colégio Nacional are individuals of rights, producers of knowledge and meaning and their learning processes happen autonomously in a network of social relationships among children, educators and relatives. It is important – “the development of the dialogical relations ‘teacher-family’, an increase of pedagogical and psychological knowledge of parents” [2].

To promote a common well through Education, with a better commitment to self-caring, caring for other and caring about the place, the appreciation for respecting diversity, for sustainability, for the encouragement to creativity and the permanent pursuit of renovation based on our history, on the technology and science advances become the cause and the life of the teacher from this educational institute.