Multimodal Analyses of Children’s Voices as a Means for Critical Teachers’ Education

This chapter discusses the role of multimodal analysis in the critical understanding of the meanings of childhood by early childhood educators in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, impoverished children suffered due to the lack of infrastructure that limited their access to school. In this sense, this work aims to present the importance of multimodal analysis in teacher education to invoke (new) possible ways of fighting the unfair conditions of children’s lives. This study is theoretically based on a socio-cultural-historical perspective and uses a multimodal approach to understand different childhood perspectives. Methodologically, it works within the critical collaborative perspective, which aims to create a safe space for researchers, teachers, and children to collaborate in the data’s production, selection, and analysis. For this chapter, the analysis focused on data from a group of 4- to 6-year-old children at a public pre-school in an impoverished area of São Paulo. The data refers to activities organised by teachers before and during the pandemic. The multimodal analyses of the verbal-visual material presented children silencing and voicing their positions, mediated by their situated contexts. The results indicate that, before the pandemic, children had more opportunities to voice different positions unveiling omissions of discursive practices. This multimodal analysis, developed in collaboration with educators, allowed providing attention to children’s experiences while simultaneously uncovering the need for educators, families, carers, and researchers to avoid imposing an adult-centric and one-truth-only narrative of life and devising (new) possibilities for children to develop their agencies.