Creatively Enhancing Community Transformation Through Work with Children and Families

Abstract

This chapter discusses community transformation through a teacher education project, Learn through Playing, which works with young children and their families in some deprived neighborhoods of São Paulo, Brazil. It examines how young children, parents, teachers, principals, coordinators, even teacher educators, and researchers develop collective intentionality based on a shared object which is created and recreated throughout different interlinked activities that compose the project, i.e., its Creative Chain. This creation of a shared intentionality demanded that each activity created the meaning of a reading community as an object of the activity (Vygotsky. In M. Cole et al. (Org.), Mind in society. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1930/1978). In each activity, subjects presented their points of views, support, explanations, descriptions, definitions, and performances as part of a responsible community that developed means of going beyond the previous limitations of their own ideas. Therefore, the transformation occurred not only in terms of individuals changing their ways of seeing and participating in the world through reading but also by means of the transformation of the collectivity as a reading community. The importance of thinking about the transformation of collectivities, and not simply about changing or refocusing immediate activities in which individual subjects are involved, was central for the development of human potential through a culture of de-silencing and understanding which generates potential for community transformation (Freire. Pedagogia do Oprimido. Paz e Terra, Rio de Janeiro, 1968).