“Não coube tudo no mapa”: usos de tecnologias nas rotinas de crianças que vivem em espaços rurais no município de Caparaó/MG

Abstract

The composition of this work followed numerous ways in order to produce a thesis-map, driven by memories, practices and experiences accumulated throughout our educational path. The central question of the research is to understand how children who live and study in rural areas of the municipality of Caparaó, located in the Zona da Mata region of Minas Gerais, use new technologies in their daily lives, materialized mainly in technological objects such as smartphones, tablets and computers. In search of answers to our question, we explicitly outlined our objectives: to investigate whether the fact that children live in rural areas interferes in the use and production of their representations through experiential maps, based on the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT); to analyze in which situations of technology use children are included; to understand how children and their experiences are inserted in the globalized world in which we live, dense with technology, science and information. Throughout the journey, we dialogued with authors from different epistemological fields: Geography (Santos 1978, 2006; Amorim, 2007, 2011; Ab’Saber, 2003), Geography of Childhood (Lopes, 2005; Lopes and Costa, 2017), Childhood Studies, based on the perspective of Historical-Cultural Studies (Sarmento 1997, 2005, 2009; Lopes, 2008a, 2013, 2018; Vasconcellos, 2008; Vygotsky, 1996, 2007, 2010) and Media and Education (Borges, 2007, 2009; Belloni, 2004, 2008, 2022; Buckingham, 2007, 2010, 2022; Fantin, 2006, 2011; Girardello, 2018, 2021; Kenski, 2012, 2015), among others. The immersion in the research sites and the encounter with the subjects with whom we worked – 23 children, enrolled in 3 municipal schools – was guided by a specific methodology, in which the production of experiential maps by the children made it possible to map different uses of technologies in their routines. The phase that involved the fieldwork considered the ethics of research with children, discussing with them everything from the conception of the investigation, the acceptance term, conceptual elements involving the use of ICT; to achieve the proposed objectives, discussion circles were held, records on experiential maps, observations and written records by the researcher. The families participated through a survey conducted using Google Forms, which was extremely important for understanding the socioeconomic context of the place where we conducted our study. The end of this long journey was marked by exquisite records and certainties: the experiential maps that the children produced offer a powerful repertoire of data, showing how they are in the world, how they live, move around and perceive the environment in which they are, as well as how they use and record on maps the different technologies.