Aesthetic Encounters With Textiles in Early Childhood Education: Two Brazilian Cases / Experiencias estéticas con textiles en la Educación Infantil: dos casos brasileños

This article investigates how cultural artefacts enable the constitution of aesthetic encounters for young children, including infants, within Brazilian early childhood education centres (ECEC). Grounded in cultural-historical psychology and ethnography in education, the study examines the role of such artefacts in children’s cultural development. Perezhivanie , a Russian term that may be broadly understood as ‘lived experiences’, is adopted as the unit of analysis, enabling an understanding of young children’s cultural development in a dialectical relationship with the materiality of ECEC. Through contrastive and microgenetic analyses of play interactions in two Brazilian cities, the study reveals the historicity of children’s aesthetic perezhivaniya , their relationship with imagination, the centrality of bodily engagement, and the processes through which the social environment of the ECEC becomes a social situation of development. The findings underscore the political and pedagogical implications of how educational spaces are materially organised, arguing for aesthetics as a guiding principle that values experimentation, contemplation, curiosity, and co-constructed meaning. This perspective challenges dominant educational models by proposing an alternative temporality – one that embraces dialogue, alterity, and cultural production with children.