Friendship and childhood education

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the studies related to Early Childhood Education, exploring the friendships marked by race, gender, class, and age, in a Municipal Center for Early Childhood Education that attends 5-year-old children. It is an ethnography carried out in the city of São Paulo for seven months, using field notes. Based on the analyses, we highlight that the relationships between children and the perception they have on their ethnical-racial and gender identities are established by the contact with the differences. In their daily experience, children built meanings with reality and transformed the proposed meanings every time they played together practicing friendship.