Abstract:
This paper analyzes the influence of the actions of the Projeto Cidade Criança (City
Child Project) on the holistic development of children in social vulnerability. The
referred project is carried out by the Assembly of God Evangelical Church City of
Workers, in the city of Fortaleza, in the state of Ceará. In this study, the quest was to
answer the following question: how has the non-formal education carried out by the
City Child Social Project contributed to the holistic formation of the children?
Therefore, it is a case study, developed through explanatory research and, though
this is a specific technique of qualitative research, it uses quantitative evidence. Its
goal was to understand the reality researched. For the survey of the data which
provide the foundations for this research, we used as our base indicators which
would lead to the identification of risk and protection factors to which (the children)
were exposed, as well as the influence of the actions of the social project in the
holistic development of the children. The analysis of this last issue represented the
general goal of this study. The specific goals were delineated as: conceptualizing
holistic education and its historical context in Brazil; identifying the possibility of
complementarity between formal and non-formal education in the development of a
holistic education; defining the social educational context in which the children
attended by the City Children Project are inserted; evaluate the interface of the
pedagogical action of the school and of the social project. Understanding that
education permeates all the spaces of communal interaction of a person, we initially
sought to reflect on the concept of holistic education, for which we carried out a
dialog between the concepts of formal education and non-formal education and its
complementarity as a strategy for the development of a proposal for holistic
education. The aspect of human development was supported by the bio-ecological
approach, which comprehends all the life contexts of the person in development as
interconnected structures, therefore the need for dialog between them, where these
must establish stable structures for a healthy development to take place. Toward this
end the analysis of the context in which the children participating in the project were
inserted was carried out according to a pre-established sampling. In this way we
intend to contribute to an evaluation as to the possibility of complementarity between
formal education represented by the school system and non formal education
represented by the actions of the organized civil society for a holistic formation.
