Editorial introduction: millions of children caught in the storm

Latin American democracies are living through uncertain times and current political decisions often represent threats to children´s rights.

In spite of the particularities of each nation, Latin American countries share historical circumstances that make them similar in terms of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). They are also subject to adverse public policies intended to address political and social debts. As a result, children from 0 to 6 years are more marginalized than other countries in the capitalist world.

Significant investment in resources is needed to overcome the high levels of poverty resulting from the social and economic inequalities common to all Latin America. Nevertheless, we see a growing privatization of services and market forces in educational provision for ECEC are exacerbating the lack of basic life opportunities in early years.

In order to consider this situation more deeply, we describe the historical background of Latin America, assuming that policies as well as educational practices are better understood when we consider the history, social and political structures of a territory.

1. Considering Latin America

The population of Latin America is close to 650 million people with around 94 million children aged from 0 to 8. (CEPALSTAT 2018).

In 1971, Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan writer, published ‘Latin America´s Open Veins’. In its introduction, ‘120 million children caught in the storm,’ he denounces the complex context of exploitation imposed on this part of the world, since the sixteenth century when it was ‘discovered’ – or invaded according to the populations who were already living here in well organized and stable civilizations.

After several centuries the international mechanisms of wealth and labour division continue to define the Southern part of the continent as a loser. In times of free market forces, ‘to speak of fair prices sounds like a medieval concept’¹ and this may explain why Latin America keeps on making concessions to powerful markets that make no concessions in return.

In the course of this history, as Galeano states, Latin-American people even lost the right to call themselves Americans, although Cuba and Haiti were the first territories known in America.

Help from Washington to address poverty has historically come in the form of loans with exorbitant interest rates that have constantly drained the wealth of ‘beneficiary countries’ as debts mount and become increasingly impossible to repay.

Under the pretext of restraining the spread of socialist ideas, the US supported and sustained military dictatorships in many countries on the continent from the 1950s to the 1990s. Guatemala, Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, Peru and Chile suffered an enormous impact on efforts to secure and develop civil rights, including public policies on education – key to the creation of any nation. Before that, in the nineteenth century, the US had stopped the Pan-American Movement, an attempt to unite the Spanish-speaking countries under one bloc of independent republics, organized by Simon Bolivar.

Thus, the history of Latin American underdevelopment has been managed and intentionally promoted from outside the region, with the consent of local financial elites that concentrate the wealth in each country.

The last major attack on Latin-American sovereignty was the Washington Consensus (1989) which promoted privatization of state services and destroyed national economies favouring financial capital and normalising poverty (Tendler 2008; Guzmán 2020).

This context seems essential to any understanding of early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Latin America, its movements, challenges and the history of its development.

Another important issue to consider – and a potential resource – is the constitution of Latin American populations. One hundred and thirty million of our population is Afro-descendant – 100 million of them in Brazil, almost half of the Brazilian population (Silva 2013). The indigenous population amounts to 45 million people in 17 of the 20 Latin American countries (CEPAL 2015), the largest numbers in Mexico and Peru

Darcy Ribeiro (1975), a Brazilian anthropologist, classifies the Latin American people into three cultural-historical groups: original peoples; new peoples and transplanted peoples. Original peoples represent the high civilizations that suffered the impact of European civilization and remain today in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. The Spanish culture and new regulatory institutions did not eradicate customs, beliefs and values that underpinned their ethnic identity and their ways of living and engaging with the world: collective activity; nature as a vital environment; polytheism, animism and shamanic traditions; and a plurality of languages and cultures.

The new peoples in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Antilles and part of Central America represent populations shaped by biological amalgamation and acculturation of Indigenous peoples, Africans and Europeans. These populations were created by the confluence of groups profoundly different in their cultural, racial and linguistic characteristics, configured as new peoples shaped by slavery and colonization. Although Indigenous groups remain, increase in number and maintain their culture in Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil,² they are no longer predominant.

The transplanted peoples differ from the other two peoples due to their European profile. Argentina, Uruguay and Chile are nations constituted by the migration of European populations that imported ways of living from their places of origin and replaced the original populations. Such configurations in part explain why, although we have historical experiences in common and speak similar languages (Portuguese in Brazil and Spanish in the rest of Latin America) our countries are still different from each other. One issue that unites us is the millions of children caught in the storm: children living in poverty away from urban centres, in slums on the outskirts of large cities and caught up in migrations. Families are migrating to escape violence, economic crisis, poverty or lack of educational opportunities: from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala through Mexico to the US (Matusceli 2017), within Latin America, from Venezuela and Haiti to Brazil, Argentina and Chile, and to the continent from China.

2. ECEC: an overview

Despite the context of hardship, educational conditions for children have improved in the last few decades. Several studies (OEI 2018; SITEAL 2017) show a sustained increase in the attendance of children aged from 0 to 6 at ECEC centres in all countries of the region (Alliaume 2018; Blanco 2018).

ECEC provision began to appear in this region in the last decades of the19th century. However, they were individual institutions, many of them non-public and charitable. Assistance was provided for poor children and education for more affluent classes.

However, significant growth of ECEC services took place in the final decades of the twentieth century. In Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela attendance rates for children aged 4 to 6 now exceed 90%. Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay and the Dominican Republic have rates between 60% and 90% and Bolivia, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala have rates below 60% (SITEAL/SIPI 2017).

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) had a significant impact on ECEC policies in most Latin American countries.³ Following the Convention, all countries created laws, codes or systems to protect the rights of children and adolescents, with the exception of Cuba, whose Childhood and Youth Code preceded it. Most countries have developed specific plans for early childhood; the others have combined plans for childhood and adolescence (Mattioli 2019).

Most of these documents were created by advisers, campaigners and researchers on ECEC policies and some countries created specific bodies with responsibility for early years policy, such as Councils, Boards and District Attorneys specializing in childhood at national, provincial and municipal levels.

Except in Cuba, ECEC is mandatory for all 5 years old children in Latin America and understood as a parental obligation to enrol children in school rather than a state obligation to offer the service to those who require it (Blanco 2018). In Mexico, Peru and Venezuela schooling is compulsory for children from the age of 3. In Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama and Uruguay, it starts at 4 and for all other countries, at 5 (Mattioli 2019). Although some services are offered full time, they are mostly part-time services.

For children from 0 to 3, the picture is different. As public policies and resources focus on children aged 4 to 6, services for children under 3 are overlooked. Some countries still address the youngest children with policies managed by Welfare Departments while the mandatory provision for older children is managed by Education Departments. As a consequence, care and education of the youngest continue to be a point of tension: services are more recent, have less coverage and do not reach the children who need the most support to overcome the effects of inequality. The distinction between care and education continues to present challenges (Blanco 2011).

There are a number of ECEC services for ages from birth to 6 in the region, not necessarily covered by public funds and more often provided to alleviate the absence of public policies: poor policies for the poor (Franco 1984).

According to Mattioli (2019) with the support of UNESCO and IIEP (International Institute for Planning on Education – Office for Latin America), one type of ECEC is the Service Focused on Families. The most famous and oldest program – Educa a tu Hijo (Educate your Child) – was developed in Cuba in the 1970s to offer educational support to parents living in rural areas who could not reach an ECEC centre (Cuba 1992). Programs focused on families are also found in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Chile, Ecuador and Peru. These services usually deal with health, nutrition and social support, attempting to compensate for poverty – except in Cuba, where the program has a pedagogical approach.

A second type of service is the Community Homes organized by caregivers or ‘community mothers’ that care for children from the neighbourhood to enable parents to work. The service may be offered in the ‘community mother’ house or a neighbourhood collective setting like community centres, civil society organizations or churches. They can be either informal or receive some support from local government. Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Paraguay, Uruguay and Costa Rica offer such programs that also focus more on enabling parents to work than on child development, a consequence of misunderstanding the relationship between care and education.

A third type is Child Development Centres, mostly focused on children up to 3, in some cases, 4 years old. The distinctive feature of these centres, in comparison with the Community Homes, is a higher level of regulation, with environment, curriculum and professional qualifications prescribed by guidelines established by the institutions responsible for education in each country. Also, according to Mattioli (2019), they usually serve children in situations of poverty, providing programmes intended to improve their life conditions, nutrition and health care. Some examples are: Institute for Children and Adolescents in Uruguay; Institute for Children and Family in Ecuador; National System for Integral Development of the Family in Mexico.

Most countries offer these services according to the national structure of ECEC and age of compulsory ECEC enrolment. This service is generally provided by the government and is therefore public and free of charge. Services like the Community Homes, however, struggle with poor infrastructure, lack of personnel training, and lack of leadership and supervision.

The Initial Level Educational Centres constitute a network regulated by laws and supported by the government Education Ministries or Departments, which guarantee free education for the initial level. For most countries, this service corresponds to compulsory ECEC and, unlike the others services, offers a pedagogical approach. In Brazil education from 0 to 3 is provided by the state in these centres, but also by private ECEC centres and by a partnership between public and NGOs or philanthropic institutions (Oliveira 2016).

There is a growing perception, among professionals who work with ECEC from birth to 6, about the inseparable relation between care and education (São Paulo 2015b; Tiscordio 2019), but these concepts are not usually integrated even when both services are supported and oriented by the same Education Department, as in Brazil. This integration is challenging since the number of children who enter ECEC services at a few months old and stay there until they enrol in elementary school is constantly increasing.

3. ECEC public policies: announcements versus practices

Laws for the promotion and protection of children’s rights are not homogeneous in Latin America and some significant differences stand out. Some countries, like Colombia, have adopted informal attendance as a national policy for non-mandatory ECEC. Some, like Brazil, place education from 0 to 6 under the responsibility of the educational sector (Brasil 2010). Others, as in Chile, have non-mandatory ECEC managed by welfare departments. But there are some similarities. ECEC is provided by a mix of public and private services. Children under 3 are overlooked. The poorest children have less access to services (Blanco 2011; Brasil 2013). However, the recognition that learning begins at birth and requires both care and education would imply a need to expand the provision of basic education. This discussion has contributed to an understanding that the education of young children is not synonymous with shortening childhood and that early schooling is not synonymous with preparation for later years.

However, there is often a gap between the announcement of policies and their implementation. Advances in laws and plans do not always result in the development of effective, comprehensive and intersectoral policies and the investments necessary for the implementation of policies that prioritize small children may not be guaranteed (Minster 2017; Rosemberg 2011).

The same gap between announcements and practices also affects local documents that regulate daily practices in ECEC. These documents may present small children as protagonists, agents in their learning processes and individuals with rights. However, daily practice and methodologies are often significantly at odds with these guidelines. In the absence of a solid professional development policy to scaffold teachers´ actions, practices often prevail that prevent children from participating in school life and in decision-making (Minster 2017). Words are quickly uttered; translating them into everyday reality requires more effort and resources, investments in infrastructure and professional development.

National curricular guidelines for ECEC generally concern children from 4 to 6 years old, and, in many situations, they contain prescriptions that impoverish educational quality. Practices become a reproduction of plans devised outside the territory and by professionals far from the cultural experience of the groups to which they are addressed (Blanco 2011, 2018). Excessive regulation may also lead to standardized education and inhibit teachers’ initiative to follow children´s interests. Pressure for improved results and administrative demands comes along with standards and leads to bureaucratization and excessive control over teaching work. Absence of guidelines may deepen differences in ECEC. Inflexible regulations may hinder creativity, innovation, local culture and children’s participation in defining the curriculum. ‘The possibility for teachers to be creative will sustain creativity and freedom for the children, which are essential for a broad development of human potentialities’ (Blanco 2018, 34).

Another problem that harms public policies on education in Latin America is the absence of a long-term education project. This absence leads to the introduction of new curricular proposals with every change of government (Blanco 2018).

Ensuring children’s rights is not a single task, it involves a combination of policies. It requires the guaranteeing of families’ rights, such as access to adequate housing and infrastructure, welfare and educational services, fair incomes and strategies to develop care and education skills that continue the educational approach carried out in ECEC centres (UNICEF 2019). It involves an equitable approach, including intercultural ECEC services that guarantee children’s rights from birth. It requires the effective implementation of what official documents announce.

4. Basic needs above rights

As ECEC services become increasingly visible in the community, social pressure to expand places grows. Governments answer by increasing provision but disregarding educational quality (Catalán 2018; Blanco 2018; Molfino 2019; Jimenez 2019; Gaínza 2019). In general, policies still focus on responding to basic needs rather than addressing children’s right to quality. Most services do not have adequate investment in teacher education (Catalan 2018) but recognition of children’s rights to develop and live with dignity is important because these are rights which may be demanded from the State (Blanco 2018).

Quality in ECEC remains a challenge and from a pedagogical perspective must overcome ‘technical, mercantilist, bureaucratic-administrative approaches from international credit agencies’ (Molfino 2019, 9) such as the Interamerican Development Bank and the World Bank that publish guidelines for Latin American education.

If quality is guaranteed by the participation of all involved in the service (Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 2003), this requires debates, including community, children, professionals and researchers, to build a shared understanding of quality. It also requires considering the plurality of cultures of a territory and pondering the school’s role in presenting the accumulated social-historical culture to new generations, especially in its most elaborated local and universal forms (Vygotsky 2018).

Adult-child ratios, teachers’ experience and education, availability of other professionals in school, time for professional development, planning, contact with families and community all impact the organization and use of the environment, relations among children and between children and adults, and time management define children’s experiences (Tiscordio 2019).

Latin American countries have increased investment in ECEC: building new centres and establishing guidelines for the construction of settings to provide better conditions for children’s development (Tiscordio 2019; Brasil 2006); encouraging projects that respect children´s right (Campos and Rosemberg 2009); and defining time for professional development during working hours (Brasil 1996). This is all important when informing everyday practices: organization of the environment and how children use it; how adults respect children; how time is managed; respecting children’s right to choose what to do; how the curriculum considers children and their desire for knowledge. Appropriate buildings are useless if teachers do not reflect on their environment, do not promote its diversity or do not consider how the environment affects children’s autonomy and learning. The same applies to teacher training when it focuses on techniques rather than foundations for a pedagogical theory that encourages teacher autonomy and responsibility.

Therefore, although in Latin America we found regulations concerning the delivery of ECEC, it is not clear that they help to improve ECEC quality. In Chile, for instance, regulations are managed by several different public ministries, such as health, housing, education and ‘sometimes the perspective of the whole seems to be lost, something that all regulations, especially at this level, should have’ (Conselho de Redação-Chile 2018, 5).

Another topic to be addressed is equity or inequity. As pointed out by Blanco and Delpiano (2005) and Jimenez (2019), the right to education should ensure ‘the possibility to achieve other individual and political rights and, consequently, exercise citizenship, which is the foundation of a society with social justice and democracy’. The fact that, beyond mandatory enrolment, most countries focus on children from families with low income, ignores every child’s right to participate with peers in an educational institution from the first years of life. Because states have not developed policies to deliver universal provision in ECEC, opportunities arise for investment from the private sector promising quality, but quality as determined by the financial market. Therefore, ‘to avoid the ghetto of the poor, the rich make their own ghettos’ (Guzmán 2018, 25).

The right to childhood is taken from children when they grow up under pressure to be ‘ready’ for elementary school earlier and earlier, even though this may compromise their emotional and intellectual development. Families and teachers seem unwilling to accept that children have a present and not only a future.

If we want to meet the goal of educating every child to be a leader (Gramsci 1982) there are many challenges that must be addressed: understanding the periodization of human development in early childhood; universalization of access to high-quality provision in all regions; overcoming inequality in class and gender curricula considering the values and worldviews of each culture; involvement of families. Professional development must equip teachers to face the complexity of education and care informed by a developmental perspective (Davidov 1988) that respects the need for children agency in learning and development.

The biggest challenge for public policies is still to overcome the gap between what is promised and what is actually delivered.

5. Pedagogies from the south

We Latin Americans have only two options: resignation or indignation. And I will never resign.

(Ribeiro 1982)

Our challenge is to turn indignation into action (Barbosa 2011). Thus, while there is a lack of commitment to ECEC from governments, manifested in the gap between announcements and implementation of public policies, there is a growth in programs concerned with a new concept of the child, a new understanding of how children learn and develop at different ages and a new understanding of the role of ECEC in human development. Contemporary studies of the sociology of childhood and the cultural-historical approach of Lev Vygotsky present a conception of childhood as a social-historical construct and a concept of child as being active in her contexts of life with peers and adults. As a result, developmental pedagogies based on participation reveal babies and children empowered to (re) signify and (re) create culture, actively participating in their learning and development.

Inspired by ECEC experiences from northern Italy, from the Pikler Institute, the work of the Rosa Sensat Teachers Association in Barcelona and the pedagogical approach of Celestin Freinet, as well as practices of ECEC developed in Latin America, there is a growing understanding that the initial years of life are the most important for the development of personality and intelligence that will condition adult life. These concepts begin to inform the creation of laws and public policies setting ECEC as the first stage of basic education (Brasil/MEC/SEB 2013). Nevertheless, the establishment and security of these concepts are subject to retreats and threats (Brasil/MEC/SEB 2013), whether in policies, legislation or investments, as is now happening in Brazil.

Although much of what is announced in official documents is not usually realised in public policies, a number of schools have taken advantage of what is published and, in cooperation with families and communities, have developed innovative experiences that take local culture as a starting point for the educational process (São Paulo 2015b; Catalini 2019; Wiggers 2007; Oliveira 2018).

Moreover, many projects are distinctive for developing a new pedagogy born out of the specificities of this region, pedagogies from the south, that intentionally or unintentionally decolonize pre-established ideas about education and establish ways of ‘educating beyond capitalism’ (Meszaros 2005). Schools in indigenous villages in Colombia, as discussed by Caro and Garnier in this Issue, in Brazil (Tiriba 2011; Maher, 2012), in Paraguay (Hornung 2019) and in Argentina (Rocoroni 2017) are recovering traditions and languages and opening up possibilities for indigenous youth to attend university. Afro-descendent communities are providing education that values and respects cultural diversity, preserves the community’s cultural manifestations and provides new forms of access to culture outside the community (Carabalí 2017; Rosas 2018; Santiago 2014; Garcia 2017; Brasil 2012). In schools in settlements of landless rural workers around Brazil, teachers are respecting children as creative agents of their own development (Rosseto 2018). Small ECEC units along the rivers in northern Brazil (Teixeira 2014) are achieving levels of quality that amaze visitors from the south who assume that rich southern states have better quality in ECEC. Schools in Mexico and Brazil are developing policies to welcome migrant children and their families (Díaz 2017; Hernández 2017; UNESCO/SME 2020) and schools in poor areas are using art to rescue children from violence and social exclusion (Farias and Mello 2010; Sierra 2010).

Far from urban contexts and neo-liberal economic policies, children can enjoy contexts full of opportunities to discover, explore and act. They are free to interact with children of different ages, with nature and also to understand the history and struggles of the communities where they belong.

These projects articulate the relationship between child and group and encourage families to participate, considering that enabling participation is a way of including those excluded from society (Freire 2013). Distant from the centres of control, such schools have greater flexibility to adapt and respond to the peculiarities and history of their context and to the expectations, perceptions and views of children and families. This is something that is often announced in official documents but not usually present in the daily lives of schools due to the limited professional development of teachers and lack of investment.

Teachers who are committed to community start listening to and valuing children’s initiatives and the diversity of their responses. Such attitudes introduce a new school culture that focuses on children’s development and respects their rhythm and pace, understanding the languages that children use to connect with and learn about the world. In such situations, adults seem to abandon their fear of ‘wasting’ young children’s time. More than that, teachers value play and leisure time as opportunities for interaction among children and overcoming historical prejudices. They introduce new methodologies that resist pressures from later stages, especially the technical approach to reading and writing. They know that educating children is more than preparing the obedient workforce for a globalized society (Tiriba 2011; Rossetto 2018). A feature that characterizes all of these projects is the shared exercise of power, recognising that quality in education comes from thinking collectively (Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 2003).

In general, there is an increasing visibility of Indigenous and Afro-descendant children (CEPAL (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) 2015, Rosas 2018; Baniwa 2019; Souza 2018), a new recognition of the ethnic origin of the populations Brasil (2004), of children in rural areas (Martinez, Botaya, and Mazzoleni 2018), and of children from homeless families (Gobbi 2016).

This growing visibility of children and ECEC can be measured by the growing number of study groups about ECEC involving in-service and training teachers, in ECEC centres and Universities. Also, by the research groups on ECEC joined by researchers from different universities and research centres. In Brazil, for example, according to data from the Directory of Research Groups in 2010, there were 309 research groups on childhood – 109 specifically focused on ECEC – registered in the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq in Portuguese). The last Seminar of Research Groups on Children and Childhood (6th GRUPECI) brought together 74 of these groups. Likewise, civil society forums organized in regions, states and nationally, like the Inter-Forums Movement for Early Childhood Education in Brazil (MIEIB), which brings together state forums organized in all Brazilian states, help government to establish policies on ECEC and sometimes confront government proposals.

In summary, it is possible to offer high-quality ECEC in Latin America but it seems clear that the problems that now threaten ECEC and children’s well-being and learning come from outside the educational system. They are part of the broader context of Latin America, with its political, social and economic components and they have to do with social justice, democracy and wealth distribution (Soler 2011; Blanco 2011). The sad fact is that in ECEC, as in all sectors, educational inequality follows social inequality (Fernandes 2013).

6. Eleven approaches to Latin American early childhood education

The articles presented in this issue focus on Latin American policies for ECEC. The first set of articles all deal with curriculum and children´s rights.

The first, by Redondo, focuses on the plural and complex reality of children and public policies for ECEC in Argentina and across Latin America. It highlights circumstances that shaped the development of ECEC in Argentina in the context of the political circumstances in Latin America that threaten children’s fundamental rights. It problematizes the role of the State, as provider and regulatory body, in guaranteeing the right to education; the economic conditions that determine the ‘infantilization of poverty’; gender issues; the concepts of children and childhood adopted in society; and the gap between laws that announce children´s rights and their implementation. In Argentina, although the history of ECEC has underpinned children’s rights, neoliberal policies implemented in the last few decades have impacted ECEC with attempts to close services, cut down investments, change the curriculum in ways that impoverish children´s experience and persecute teachers who oppose government policies. As in other countries in Latin America, social organizations and community networks have been carrying out different educational initiatives to address the challenges posed by government agendas.

The study presented by Barco and Carrasco considers the complex mechanisms of access to ECEC in Chile that combine public, private and state-funded provision under a voucher-demand scheme. It analyzes the policies adopted in the country to promote access for disadvantaged families, considering the relationship between availability, accessibility and affordability, on the one hand, and conditions of family, centres and providers, on the other. The results show that, despite policies to prioritize access, there are situations involving availability, accessibility implementation and financing practices that limit access by disadvantaged families. The discussion provides new evidence of conditions that create inequity in access and also tools to analyze access to ECEC in a context where provision has increased through a privatization strategy implemented in Chile at all levels of education. Chile was the first country in Latin America to experience the Washington Consensus and possibly the country where the model caused most damage.

Etchebehere and De León report on two studies based on two fundamental principles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child ratified by Uruguay: progressive autonomy and child participation. In study 1, ECEC teachers were the target population and the principle of progressive autonomy was the axis of analysis. The study describes and discusses teachers’ speech and practice on the notion of progressive autonomy, how it is interpreted by teachers and what actions they take to guarantee it for children aged 3 to 5 years. The second study focused on the contextual and organizational processes that enable children’s participation in ECEC and identified and analysed conditions that favour children’s participation. Both studies highlight existing tensions between what the Convention announces and the real conditions for its implementation, due to the multiple relationships woven between objective and subjective aspects in the universe of ECEC centres.

In the fourth article, Tebet, Santos, Costa, Lima Santos, Pontes, Oliveira and D’Andrea discuss the inserimento (transition) process for babies in six public ECEC institutions from five municipalities in Brazil. The study assumes that a well-planned period of transition and adjustment of babies and young children into the context of ECEC can promote better quality of services for babies and families. The authors conceptualize quality as the construction of meaning through dialogue and critical reflection based on ‘concrete human experience’. They highlight babies’ actions, paths and relationships that constitute their experience with the environment underlining that gender, race and class must inform debates on inserimento and quality in ECEC. The results show that even though there is a set of official guidelines for quality practices for baby’s inserimento, the strategies adopted in the contexts studied vary significantly, since they depend on a set of elements that cross this process and form a complex network. They also suggest that an inserimento that respects children´s rights requires special attention to the particularities of all involved.

Leopold Costábile analyzes the tensions and uncertainties faced in the implementation of a curriculum framework for ECEC to ensure pedagogical continuity between the Basic Curriculum Design for children aged 0–3, 3–6 and Primary Education Program in Uruguay. This curriculum is part of the government’s investment in ensuring more comprehensive and effective care and education, actions to improve socio-cultural conditions especially for children living in poverty. Repeating a situation common to other Latin American countries, children and adolescents in Uruguay are the majority of the population living in poverty. However, institutionalized ordinary practices are not implemented at the same pace as guidelines are produced. As Leopold says, words seem to have trouble finding things. Therefore, in considering the process of implementing the curricular structure as a public policy for ECEC in Uruguay, she emphasizes the urgent ethical and political task of transforming the social circumstances of children through new possibilities of ECEC approaches and programs.

Girotto, Souza, Hernandes and Selfa discuss a Brazilian government policy to encourage the practice of introducing children from 0 to 5 years to living with literature and to prepare teachers, as readers, to carry out the national program of libraries in schools and ECEC centers. The study aimed to evaluate the reach of the program and the impact on the process of training readers. Data collected in 68 ECEC units, in the western region of the state of São Paulo, indicate a gap between what is proposed by public policies to educate the future reader from early ages and current practices implemented in ECEC centers. There is a restricted circulation of the books provided by the program and a lack of knowledge about the program among educational managers, who, in many cases keep the books away from the children. The study also indicates teachers’ unpreparedness to act as mediators of early childhood literary reading practices. In a country historically and intentionally built to be illiterate, this should be no surprise.

In the second set of articles, the main discussion is about professionalization.

The article written by Gillanders, Bonnelly, Valenzuela Hasenorhr, Varela Londoño, Quiroga Otálora, Valentin Martínez, Viviani and Diaz-Posada identifies the efforts of three Latin American countries to develop their own standards for preparing ECEC teachers. A comparative analysis identified facilitators and barriers in the standards development process, as each country has different ways of defining ECEC, given the different types of attendance and different historical traditions in ECEC. In Latin America, since the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Chile, Colombia and the Dominican Republic have enacted laws with a specific focus on ECEC which promote an increase in comprehensive coverage. However, several governmental and non-governmental entities provide ECEC and articulating their roles and functions is a challenge. The standards were developed within existing higher education structures, based on their concepts of the child and of the role of the teacher, and were designed to be linked to the national curriculums for early childhood education. Their creation, despite the difficulties in reaching consensus as to quality in ECEC, represents a promising effort to improve the training of ECEC teachers.

Pardo and Adlerstein discuss the System for Teacher Professional Development, implemented in Chile in 2016, which includes all ECEC teachers in a single system in which everyone is subject to the same rules and with rights to the same professional incentives. This corrects the previous system which only encompassed ECEC teachers working in municipal schools. Although an ECEC bachelor’s degree from a higher education institution has been required since 1974, professional development programs were unevenly regulated, reflecting the institutional fragmentation of ECEC provision delivered by different institutions: publicly subsidized private schools, public state and municipal schools, and privately funded schools. The System now in place regulates undergraduate and in-service preparation, time for out-of-classroom pedagogical work, and professional career conditions, including wages. The study, focused on teachers´ views about the system, found optimism but also problems that present as paradoxes: salary justice versus monetization of the profession; professional recognition versus loss of a distinctive early years pedagogical identity; rigorous assessment versus inadequate assessment tools; and tangible individual career progress versus limited development of the field.

Sanchez Caro and Garnier report on an ethnographic study developed in Houses of Indigenous Knowledge, an ECEC service that performs positive discrimination in indigenous communities in Bogotá. These Houses carry the specific knowledge and practices of the community and their educational approach is constructed according to the concepts of education, childhood and children shared by the communities. Reflecting a movement in other countries in Latin America, this project retrieves and preserves the culture based on communities’ specific and authentic practices. The study aimed to understand how the professionalism of Indigenous Caregivers is implemented in daily practices and to elucidate how their professional identities are constructed and reconstructed by these practices. The analysis indicates the existence of tensions in the process of legitimizing Indigenous Caregivers as they become institutionalized professionals. Their professionalization happens between the parameters of ‘westernized’ training and daily practices which are rooted in indigenous traditions.

The third set of articles focuses on Quality and Assessment in ECEC.

Jensen, Pérez Martínez, García Medina, Felipe Martínez, Benito Cox and Larsen problematize the ecological validity of observation tools which are used to assess the quality of education and which may inform policymakers and impact teachers´ professional development initiatives. The research focuses on the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, a protocol developed in the US and used internationally to measure the quality of teaching and to propose improvements in the quality of teacher–child interactions. Based on a critical analysis of data collected in Mexico, the authors propose a revised model informed by ecological validity to better fit the country´s context. They highlight that addressing ecological validity can improve the internal structure of the tool and they particularly recommend paying attention to the social consequences of interpreting teaching quality scores using observation tools transplanted from one social environment to another. They emphasize the necessity of adapting the tool when using it in a different social-cultural environment.

Ribeiro and Festa describe how Brazilian public policies for ECEC have considered service quality and the assessment of that quality, especially since the end of the 1990s. The study considers legal texts produced at national level announcing important advances in governmental commitments to ECEC up to 2016 and specifically the widely debated national guidelines on ‘Quality Indicators in Early Childhood Education’. Considering these guidelines, this study focuses on the construction and implementation of a participatory institutional self-evaluation process in São Paulo, the largest ECEC network in the country. Based on nine dimensions of quality including children´s participation, listening and authorship, multiple experiences and languages, recreation contexts, ethnic-racial and gender relations and family involvement, the research points out the potential of participatory self-evaluation in the development of a better quality of ECEC. This will, however, require the deepening of schools´ democratic management and the inclusion of self-assessment in teacher preparation, as a strategy for professional development.

In compiling this special issue, we hope to present some facets of the complex reality of Latin American democracies, with an emphasis on the tentative public policies in ECEC which are still unable to remove the risk of setbacks in progress towards securing the universal rights of children.

To bring together a little of the history and current circumstances of different countries in Latin America, we have counted on the precious contributions of fellow researchers and campaigners who analyze themes of childhood and early childhood education. To them, we give our appreciation and thanks and, as Patricia Redondo asserts in the article that opens this issue, we hope this collection of different studies, to produce a picture of ECEC in our region, can help us learn from each other about educational policies and practices that support the fight for equality and that improve education opportunities for all Latin-American children.

We hope that the articles gathered in this special issue will encourage all readers to reflect.

Notes

1. Convey T. Oliver, coordinator of US policies for Latin America (Alliance for Progress in 1968, Galeano 1971, 3)

2. Brazil has the largest number of indigenous peoples. 305 indigenous peoples speaking 274 languages. But their total population of 870,000 people represents only 0.47% of the Brazilian population. https://indigenas.ibge.gov.br/images/pdf/indigenas/folder_indigenas_web.pdf. Accessed 9-1-2020

3. Brazil’s ECEC history was shaped by the militancy of women workers, inspired by the experience of those who returned to Brazil after exile in Europe, bringing feminist ideals home with them (Rosemberg 1984).