Babies’ transition between family and early childhood education and care: a mosaic of discourses about quality of services

ABSTRACT

This article aims to discuss the quality of early childhood education and care in Brazil and the process of infants’ and toddlers’ Inserimento to daycare. The theoretical framework of our arguments is based on the notion of quality of child education as a negotiated concept, and by the Italian concept of Inserimento. The methodology is based on the Mosaic Approach, a participative method to listen to young children. As part of the methodology, we participated in the inserimento process in five municipalities in southeastern Brazil, from 2016 and 2020. Data analysis was based on the pedagogy of listening and on studies on gender and racial relationships. The results show how laws, normative documents, family expectations, planning and routine of childhood education, available toys, space, babies, families, and professionals creates a complex mosaic of discourses about what constitutes the quality of childhood education in the babies' first days in daycare centers.

KEYWORDS:

• Quality
• childhood education
• babies
• infants
• inserimento

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Espaço da Escrita – Pró-Reitoria de Pesquisa – UNICAMP – for the language services provided and the support of FAPESP (through the granting of aid for the Regular Research Project – process 2015/10731-8, granted to Gabriela Tebet), CNPq (through an Undergraduate Research scholarship, granted to Julia Costa), SAE-UNICAMP (through the grant of a Social Assistance scholarship to the student Bruna Lima), and also Janet Georgeson and Carmen Dalli for contributions during the process of review.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The regular period is usually around 6 to 8 hours/day, but during the inserimento process, babies stay 1 hour, then, 2, then 3 and so on, until they feel confident to stay the full journey

2. A kind of educator that is not a teacher. To work as an educational agent there is no necessity of graduation

3. Brazilian National Law n 8,069/1990.

4. In Brazil, many families call the professionals who are in charge of their children’s education and care as ‘auntie’; this is both a way to fondly address them and to not recognize the professional aspect of this work (Freire 1997). Many believe that the only requirement to be a baby’s teacher is to love children, but in in Brazil someone who wants to work as a teacher in daycare must have a graduation in Pedagogy.

5. Data collected by Loani Pontes

6. Data collected by Sabrina de Oliveira

7. Data collected by Natália Santos

8. The general Brazilian census adopts the following racial categories: White, Black, Mixed, Yellow or Indigenous.

9. A kind of map.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo [2015/10731-8].