LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS MEDIATED BY CHILDREN′S NARRATIVE TO STIMULATE TRANSITION FROM PRESCHOOL TO PRIMARY

Children face different challenges on a daily basis in their educative process involving physical, emotional, cognitive and social factors that determine the relationships they establish with themselves and the surrounding environment. Specifically, in the school context, they experience significant situations that affect not only their academic performance, but also the socialization and adaptation to a new scenario mediated by rules, dynamics and particular actors. Among these situations is the transition from one cycle to another - preschool to primary and primary to high school - which several authors point out as a great challenge because children must confront a new and unknown scenario that is characterized, in most cases, by the "structuring of rigid and monotonous spaces, with desks in a row that impede the mobility of the student and the teacher; traditional educational practice where the transmission of pre-established knowledge is an element that openly conspires against evolutionary development" (Escobar de Murzi & Silva, 2007, p. 408) [1]. The transition from preschool to primary has become, in the last decades, a topic of great relevance in the field of child education, promoting several national and international researches. These show the impact that the transition from one level to another has on the social, affective (Acero & Aguirre, 2017) [2], cognitive and emotional development (Arango, Gomez & Maz, 2017) [3], because if there are not spaces of articulated work between the different actors (family, students and teachers), there may be problems of adaptation, repetition, dropout and low academic performance. Therefore, it is necessary to research about learning environments mediated by child narrative as a pedagogical strategy to stimulate the transition from preschool to primary in children from 5 to 6 years. This qualitative research takes place in two public schools of the districts of Bosa and Kennedy in the city of Bogota, from an investigation-action approach, involving parents and teachers in the inquiry process and giving the children a leading role. Thus, their participation in the learning environment called "My Life at school" is guaranteed, allowing them to recognize themselves as subjects with a unique life experience that they constantly resignify through oral, written and graphic narrative. This allows the development of individual and collective processes that improve their self-confidence through the accompaniment in one of the most complex transitions children have to take in their first years of life.