Celebration and transgression: representation of sports in adolescence

Abstract

The text here presented is a result of a research whose main purpose was to comprehend how the pedagogical practices that constitute the daily functioning of a social project contribute in the production of the representations about education, sports, and health, from the perspective of the children and adolescents who participated in it. The context that was investigated "a pedagogically organized university extension program planned to attend children and adolescents of urban suburbs" has as central axis of its political-pedagogical proposal the idea of education/sports/health. Our research instruments were the following: document analysis, ethnographical observations, and interviews. The knowledge generated by the research evidences advances in the comprehension of the role accomplished by "sports" in the formation of these children and adolescents. identity. These role and meaning are comparable to other transgressive spaces proper of adolescence "like the club, the park, and the beach" rarely accessed by the group that was studied. The analytical process evidenced that children and adolescents understand "sports" as the favorite option for the act of playing; "health" as the conditioning to some individual hygiene habits; and "education" as the unquestionable obedience, to professors above all. This permits to conclude that the representations constructed by the children and adolescents evidence agreement and contradiction when compared to the propositions expressed in the ideals and guidelines of the program that was studied.