Feeling the world from childhood: listening to children in everyday school life

Abstract

This text presents a pedagogical proposal grounded in the sensitive listening to children within everyday school life, understood as an ethical, aesthetic, and political gesture. The metaphor of shooting an arrow reveals the power of children’s words: though invisible to adult eyes, children know where it lands — in the territory of storytelling. Storytelling emerges as both method and ritual, opening a playful and imaginative space where oraliture unveils memories, affections, and knowledge. The proposed listening goes beyond hearing and engages the whole body: goosebumps, silence, tears, and emotional resonance shape this experience. What might seem like an ordinary school routine becomes a singular event when reading, children’s narratives, and imagination intertwine. Inspired by the ancestral knowledge of the Ibejis, whose presence in Afro-Brazilian religious spaces evokes play, song, and guidance, this writing proposes playful cracks in everyday life. These openings affirm childhood as a producer of knowledge and narrative, shifting adult centrality and recognizing children as subjects of knowledge. The pedagogical experience thus envisions a world in which children are truly heard and felt in a peripheral school, consolidating an educational practice rooted in listening, imagination, and the valuing of childhoods.