The PhD Defence in Educational Sciences of candidate Elsa Alves will take place at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Porto (FPCEUP) on 14 October 2024, at 10.00 Am. The thesis, entitled “Um outro lado dos recreios escolares: Dos conflitos entre crianças à construção de competências sociomorais e políticas”. was developed under the supervision of  Manuela Ferreira, Associate Professor of FPCEUP, member of CIIE.

The session is open to the public.

Evaluation panel: 

Chair: Isabel Menezes, Full Professor FPCEUP

Members:

Natália Fernandes, Associate Professor of  Institute of Education of the University of Minho.
Catarina Tomás, Coordinating Professor at the School of Education of the Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon.
Juliana Santana, Adjunct Professor at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil.
Maria Cristina Rocha, Associate Professor of FPCEUP
Rui Fernandes, Associate Professor of FPCEUP
Manuela Ferreira, Associate Professor of FPCEUP -  supervisor.

ABSTRACT

The research involves 16 children, both girls and boys, aged 9/10, attending the 4th grade at a private primary school in Porto. The aim is to portray them as social actors engaged in conflict situations during their playground time, detailing how they dealt with these situations, their resolutions, and their opinions on conflict and violence. The main argument is that understanding conflicts as dynamic issues and dense relational processes involving lots of meaning can only be achieved through observing and listening to the children’s social actions during the school playgrounds. These actions are inseparable from peer cultures, social groups, and their social interactions, during which children also develop essential social, moral, and political competencies for participating in social life and exercising citizenship. The argument draws on theoretical contributions from Childhood Social Studies, Gender and Childhood Studies, Violence and Conflict Studies, and Educational Sciences and supports it with ethnographic research involving children. The methods include participant observation, questionnaire surveys, and role-play techniques to describe, analyze, and comprehend conflicts during playgrounds, covering their frequency, diversity, gender-age configurations, and the forms they unfold and resolve. Throughout this journey and successive approaches to the research object, the highlighted observation is that non-conflict situations are more significant than conflict occurrences. Conflicts arise from (in)justices, provocations, disputes over object possession, physical aggression, and cognitive conflicts, often resolved by the children and among themselves. The deconstruction of the social negativity surrounding conflicts in school playgrounds reveals that, in these types of conflict, children mobilize values and rules from their cultures, gendered discourses, age statuses, and elective affinities. Retaliations are mainly verbal rather than physical, showcasing the construction of socio-moral and political skills to safeguard peer culture values and child social order through argumentation, dialogue, negotiation, and compromises. Furthermore, when distanced from specific conflict situations, these children tend to reproduce prevailing conceptions of violence based on physical violence and aggression.

Keywords: Childhood; school conflict and violence; conceptions and practices regarding conflict and violence; social, moral, and political skills