Visual reading mediations in basic education: focusing on narrative children

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss the mediation of image reading in art teaching that considers children’s narratives as mediating element. Through the methodology of Art-Based Educational Research (ABER) and the a/r/tography method, reading mediation activities were carried out with students from a first-grade class of elementary school, six-year-old children, from a municipal school in Balneário Camboriú, Santa Catarina, Brazil. The instrument of data production was the researcher’s field diary. The main theoretical contribution was Martins, Picosque, and Guerra (2009), Pillar (2014) and Rossi (2009) on image reading and Neitzel, Ferri, and Borba (2018), Martins (2014) and Uriarte, Neitzel, Carvalho, and Kupiec (2016) in relation to mediation. As a result, we point out that when art classes in formal education also have a responsibility for the aesthetic education of children, the use of narratives is one of the possibilities to establish mediation. When the teacher’s narrative is suspended to give way to the children’s narrative, when the appreciation of the work of art has space and is perceived as curricular content, the possibility of experiencing is increased. Through the interventions it was possible to perceive that when mediation allows encounters between work of art and fruition when one can share with the other the narratives constructed from the artworks, the school becomes a space of aesthetic education and the visual reading classes can add to the children’s cultural background.