Ethnography's contributions to research into the training of early childhood education teachers

Abstract

This production is the result of three ongoing master's degree research projects, carried out within the scope of a Postgraduate Program in Education (PPGE) linked to a public Higher Education Institution (IES), located in the southern region of Brazil. The research focuses on the training of early childhood education teachers, using Ethnography and document Ethnography as a methodology for generating and analyzing data. The study highlights the challenges faced in the field of education, especially in teacher training, when employing a method derived from Anthropology for scientific knowledge of social reality. The research discussed here, with theoretical support from Peirano (2014), Clifford and Marcus (2016), Ferreira and Lowenkron (2020), emphasizes the importance of a relational and procedural approach to Ethnography, avoiding its mere instrumentalization in the field of education. Thus, this work reflects a postmodern approach to ethnography, characterized by fragmentary narratives and for the distancing from the classical perspective of the 20th century, which sought to represent sociocultural totalities. Ongoing research also explores issues regarding methodological reflexivity, such as political positioning when writing about the other and the horizontal relationship between researchers and research participants, highlighting some of the contributions of ethnographic research to the analysis of formal educational environments. The contributions of Ethnography to the three researches show their reach to the visible and the invisible, to people and documents, to (mis)encounters, to pluralities and singularities, and to different forms of communication.