Material conditions of kindergartens as producers of experiences: uses of diversity and unequal relationships

Abstract

This article presents preliminary results of socio-anthropological research that took place in Early Education schools of the City of Buenos Aires. It focuses on the uses of sociocultural diversity and unequal relationships and their articulation with the materiality of everyday life conditions of the institutions in which fieldwork took place. It includes the analytical description of a social situation —the visit of an officer of the Ministry of Education to one of these Initial Schools in which research was carried on. This descriptions show the ways in which the different institutional subjects —teachers, parents, school directors, the staff member— refer to and produce the spaces in which their practices take place, and simultaneously, struggle for their places and put  under strain their diverse and unequal relationships. Afterwards, taking into account the Initial Education schools of a whole Educational District of the City, we analyze the features of the “educational offer” for Initial Schooling, the incorporation of devices  as cell phones  to everyday educational work of the kindergartens, as an aide to the teacher’s work, and the beginnings of the online school enrolment. These issues permit us to highlight the recent history of Argentina´s Initial Level teaching. The article accounts  that materiality, as the ethnographic descriptions evidence, permits to understand how, nowadays, relations of diversity and inequality come together.