Modulation of Children-Adult Relations at School: Theoretical Notes for a Debate about Student-Teacher Interaction

This study was motivated by the common-sense statements of teachers of basic education about a generalized difficulty in the relationship with the current student profile in the classroom. Here, we present the theoretical section of this doctoral study in progress in the Graduate Program in Education of PUC Minas - Brazil, presenting the configurations of the child-adult relationship in the school, personified in the figure of students and teachers, through sustained interrelationships by structure, power and agency. Our objective is to analyze the way in which the relations between both are being established in the present day, through the observation of the classroom and the listening of children and adults, supported by the theoretical references that treat: the structure as rules and resources to which individuals are based on the course of social interactions (Giddens, 2009); the institutions as a set of normative attributions about students and teachers through institutionalized practices and power exercises (Foucault, 1999) and childhood as a social phenomenon and, therefore, the child's social relations with his peers and of them with adults - intra and intergenerational relationships - (James et al., 1998; Alanen, Mayall, 2001;Qvortrup, 2010 and Corsaro, 2011). As a structure of: signification, legitimation and domination, we verify whether they refer to the mode of discourse, typification and control of adults over children; as power exercises, this process is in terms of transformation as well as domination of the subject and is directly related to their disposition in the particular structural configuration operated within the social scene; as a child as a social agent, we observe tensions and conflicts or involvement, attention and negotiation in the encounter of these different generational groups depending on the way in which the adult recognizes the child as producer of culture in a world of intense transformations.