LORDELO, Eulina da Rocha    CARVALHO, Ana Maria Almeida. Day care center as a developmental context: adult and child - child - partnerships. Temas psicol. []. 1998, 6, 2, pp.117-124. ISSN 1413-389X.

The research on developmental partnerships that opposes adult and children has advanced in identifying positive and negative effects in both contexts, although with inconclusive results. Nevertheless, the scrappy nature of this field, where the studies deal with isolated features of development - cognitive, social or affective - increases the difficulty of progress on the comprehension of the problem as a whole. Results frequently conflicting require an effort for integration that authorises us to replace the problem with a global development perspective. This effort justifies the assumption of a theoretical approach that combines a biological viewes, that supposes direction and limits, settled by evolutionary environment and a developmental bias, that supposes novelty as a product of contingencies provided by individual experiences. This work aimed to explore these ideas from some research results that focused on the interaction possibilities between adult-child and childchild, in a day care environment. The data were obtained from observations of 62 one to three year-old children. The findings point at the stability of some ways of organization, as the orientation to the adult and to the other and the change in the relative importance of each kind of partner, as the child developmental status. These empirical data can be understood in the reference frames of a comprehensive theoretical approach, like the dynamic systems, with to an ethological perspective. This frame of reference must integrate the multiple influences - context and culture, biological bases - in the development phenomena. We highlight the importance of thinking the ethological concept of development in terms of a dynamic interaction between organism versus environment, supported by research results.

: day care; partnenships; ault-child; internaction; child-child internaction.

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