School as Work or Work as School: Meanings in-Between for Children from Different Cultural Contexts

Abstract

This chapter focuses on children’s discourse about work and other significant daily activities for them from a cultural psychological perspective, which assumes it is highly relevant to understand how children and teenagers make sense of their experiences. In particular, we address specific topics in cultural psychology: the notion of a semiotic and processual definition of culture, the relationship between individual and society, and meanings as units of analysis in psychology. From interviews conducted with children from different cultural contexts in Brazil, we focus on meanings that concerned work and school in childhood. We describe and analyze three meanings built from the participants’ personal cultures: “child work,” “a job for each age,” and “school work.” The analysis of these meanings indicates that work is present, somehow, in the lives of children, even if they do not consider themselves working people. It also becomes evident that microcontexts of development, such as family and school, are not only in close relation but have overlapping semiotic dimensions, as children tend to link or even mix the activities, practices, and routines typical of each of them. These data might also alert us to the assertion of a child’s school work as one more kind of work (Qvortrup 2001), and lead us to sociological reflections that point at the school child as the new contemporary working child.