"Can I draw myself on the map?"

the children, the garden, and the geographies of lif

Abstract

This text aims to present a proposal developed in the context of a Final Course Project (TCC), in which a group of children from the early years of Elementary School from a school in the city of Canoas (RS) were invited, based on a visit/approach to a community garden in the neighborhood, to create a collective experiential map of the garden space. The creation of the map aims to geographically document the activity and value the children's logic. In this sense, the aim is to understand how the didactic proposals mediated by school geography mobilize the experiences and authorship of children. The work is based on the assumptions of Childhood Geography, in addition to being subsidized by authors who deal with School Geography. The investigation was conducted based on an ethnographic study, which highlights children's protagonism and authorship. The research reaffirmed that children's spatiality transcends the classroom, which gives multiple meanings to geographic knowledge. Furthermore, the collective construction of the map demonstrates that children translate their spatial experiences into the constitution of their geographic plenitude. Children, invited to compose the proposals taking into account their authorship, create other worlds, their own worlds, which reveal their vast repertoire of relationships, actions and (in)conclusions, which demonstrate very particular ways of experiencing space and which culminate in the production of many children's spatialities.