Que rei sou eu? Escolas públicas de excelência, políticas educacionais e currículo: uma análise sobre o processo de instituição da Educação Infantil no Colégio Pedro II

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the curricular production process in a traditional public school of the federal network of education of Rio de Janeiro, The Pedro II College. The locus of investigation is the institutional process of the Early Childhood Education as the first stage of Basic Education. From the heuristic model of analysis of educational policies of Stephen Ball, the research is developed in a discursive perspective in dialogue with Ernesto Laclau and Homi Bhabha. From these theoretical contributions, it is postulated a denial of the idea of an original, essentialized culture and is also against the curriculum as a text to be implanted. Instead, the curriculum is assumed as cultural enunciation, as discursive practices of negotiation spaces and articulation of multiple meanings produced in interconnected contexts of production. Therefore, the curriculum becomes an unfinished territory of knowledge production and political disputes in contingency situations, where different group`s interests are articulated in equivalent discourses, always in conflict because of the differences. In the context of investment in public policies that characterize a new institutionalization of childhood education in Brazil, studies on the field of early childhood education dialogue with postcolonial theories pointing the need for pedagogical practices in the education of young children in kindergartens and pre-schools that are developed on a difference perspective. The curricular policies in a 175 years old school that offers Early Childhood Education and presents itself with the discourse of excellence and quality public education are investigated in dialogue with the observation in loco of educational practices and their articulations. It is also investigated how this operates within everyday negotiations that constitutes school time-space, as a space for productions of meaning of the curriculum. The discourses that tensions the production of meanings of quality in Early Childhood Education where investigated by the analysis of the records of the diaries that where made on the field; the observations that where made in the different spaces of enunciation in the context investigated; the documentary analysis produced by the institution; websites and in interviews with coordinators, pedagogical guides and management team. The data, in the context analyzed, reveals that Child Education emerges as a difference. It constitutes itself in the practice of deferring of the school space. This space negotiates, articulates, mobilizes and dislocates institutionalized knowledge/know-how in curricular production policies. The ambivalences of Early Childhood Education are even more complex in this context. On one hand, significant advances are observed in the re-signification of childhood, from the perspective of difference and from the place of childhood in curricular productions. On the other hand, there are other tensions and displacements that mobilize the discourse of difference and equality from the questions concerning Early Childhood Education to the scope of the institution in relation with the other stages of basic education. This helps to return to the point about the limitations and possibilities of pedagogies to guarantee children`s protagonism and escapes from the educational patterns of childhood by the articulations of curricular policies of Early Childhood Education and in the significance of the hegemonic meaning of quality in the institution