Contribuição da teoria winnicottiana no contexto escolar público da creche: prática e valorização do nada

Abstract

This research investigates how D. W. Winnicott’s theory of emotional maturation can illuminate the forces at play in institutional reality and contribute to thinking about how the daycare setting can foster the maturation process in the first years of life, especially in collective care situations involving the stages of absolute and relative dependence. Winnicottian theory is taken as the theoretical underpinning to establish contact with the public daycare context that provides holding for infants and toddlers (aged 0 to 3), with emphasis on educational practice and on valuing happenings (acontecências) as formative and meaning-making powers in institutional relations. This study addresses the tension between the pedagogical field and the field of care, between what is prescribed in institutional regulations and the phenomena that emerge in everyday life, requiring responses that escape the planned or foreseen. This is a bibliographical study, grounded in the study of Winnicott’s work – particularly regarding the early stages of emotional development – and its main contemporary commentators, such as Alfredo Naffah Neto, Elsa Oliveira Dias, and others. The theoretical investigation articulates autobiographical narratives in the form of institutional vignettes, gathered over more than twenty years of the researcher’s practice in school institutions. Taken as reflective devices, these vignettes bring Winnicottian theory closer to concrete experience, bringing to light the ways in which the everyday life of the daycare center reveals itself as a field of creation and care. Based on these narratives, the happenings situated outside institutional regulations are highlighted – moments frequently referred to by professionals as “a time when nothing was done.” In this perspective, this study problematizes this type of signification and resignifies the experience of doing nothing not as absence, but as a territory where affect and the spontaneous gesture emerge – conditions for creation and for encounter. Such elements sustain the cominginto-being of infants and toddlers, establishing care as an ethical principle. The conclusion is that, by recognizing the value of everyday gestures and apparently insignificant experiences, the daycare center can affirm itself as a space of formation and production of life, in which educating and caring become expressions of presence, continuity, and recognition of the other