A prática social da mediação no fútbol callejero: processos educativos decorrentes

Abstract

Through the course of the university degree in Physical Education I realized that education is not restricted to the school environment. We educate ourselves with each other at all times and spaces. From this new perspective, I decided to search socio-educational projects and ended up finding a project of leisure activities directed to children from the suburbs of a city in the interior of São Paulo state. Amongst the activities developed by this project there is Fútbol Callejero, a game which I felt a deep affinity. After becaming engaged to this Project, I was invited to participate as a mediator of the Street Football World Cup, which took place in July 2014, in the city of São Paulo. From the experiences in the project and in this event, as well as the perception of its educational potential, I decided to deepen the studies in this social practice. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to identify and understand educational processes that emerge from the social practice of the mediation in the Fútbol Callejero. This study was conducted based on qualitative research, which does not focus on generalizations or research neutrality. The path taken by this study, both in data collection and analysis, had phenomenological inspiration, more specifically concerning the situated phenomenon. For data collection, we used interviews with six mediators held in March 2019, who attended or are attending training meetings on the Fútbol Callejero methodology. The analysis of the interviews resulted in two categories, namely: a) “Knowledge development and new practicies experience”; b) “Communitary protagonism on becoming a Fútbol Callejero mediator”. We consider that at its roots, the creators of Fútbol Callejero hoped that the game experience strengthened youth protagonism, leadership and dialogue, besides recovering values such as respect, cooperation and solidarity.