“Do you want to play? So you understand better how to play!”: ethnography as an adult experience of learning to learn with children

Abstract

Ethnographies with children, recognized as useful methodology to produce other knowledge about them and their childhoods, have contributed to consolidate the Studies of Childhood. Via ethnography as intercultural communication process and affectation with the Other/child, we access and seek to understand how they produce meanings and invest subjective senses into them, through processes of generationalisation. That challenge the established generational order. It will be pointed the paradoxical positions of the researcher when, in living the dialectics of the agency of adults and children, in the fielded work in open public spaces, have to deal with adultcentrism, and have to “learn to learn” with them, in socialization with determined corporal practices involve their socio-cultural worlds. Thus, ethnography as a process of intercultural communication and affectation with the Other/child becomes a transformative experience. This text attempts to analyse an ethnographic episode about how the adult learned certain knowledge and doings with the children of a fishing community in the north of Portugal, aged between 6 and 14 years, when they were in open public spaces. At discussion is the subjectivity and reflexivity of the ethnographer while she trails proximities in the encounters with children and learns that, in order to understand the complexity of their worlds, she must live their places and activities of whole body, immerse in affections, emotions and sensorialities.