DOCUMENTOS CURRICULARES PARA A EDUCAÇÃO INFANTIL EM MUNICÍPIOS DO MATO GROSSO DO SUL (2000 – 2015): IDENTIFICANDO CONHECIMENTOS CIENTÍFICOS, OU PODEROSOS

Abstract

This study is part of the research program of/at the Observatory of School Culture (OCE)/UFMS, which takes as sources and objects of studies curricular documents produced for the formal and non-formal education spaces, understood as an instance of school formation, with explicit educational objectives and intentional institutionalized, structured and systematic action, and as a possibility of knowledge production, selection and distribution outside the curricular structures of traditional teaching. In this context, we analyze two curricular documents produced for children’s education by the municipal education networks of Campo Grande and Dourados, namely: Curricular Framework of the Municipal Education Network for Early Childhood Education of Campo Grande-MS (2008) and Curricular Proposal of Basic Education of the Municipal Network of Education of Dourados-MS (2011). Aiming to give form to the analysis desired, we anchor in a documentary corpus, which supports the production of these documents, namely: the Decennial Education Plan of the State of Mato Grosso do Sul – Decennium 2003 – 2013; the State Education Plan of the State of Mato Grosso do Sul – Decennium 2014 – 2024; the Municipal Plan of Education of Dourados-MS/2015; the Municipal Plan of Education of Campo Grande-MS/2007. In this way, we explore, on the one hand, the principles and contents of the Critical Theory of Curriculum, starting from the hypothesis that the curricular documents become translators of official discourses on children’s education, with designs interested and addressed to the schooling processes, even though this process is “denied” and; on the other hand, based on the notion of a fair knowledge distribution prescribed for students from this stage of basic education, since the publication of the National Curriculum Frameworks for Early Childhood Education (1999). In order to try to answer or refute such a hypothesis, we identify and analyze which scientific, or powerful, knowledge is recorded in the curriculum documents chosen to be analysed. In this exercise we are guided by the techniques of comparative study, by which we try to identify and analyze the similarities, differences, diachronies and synchronies recorded, from the election of three areas of comparison - space, time and knowledge. The elected areas express, in some way, indications of the curricular practices that articulate the children’s experiences and knowledge with the scientific, or powerful knowledge, historically constructed by the men. Within the limits of this research, we conclude that, although nursery schools and preschools are legally consolidated as an expression of the right to education of children, the documentary sources generated for this stage of basic education seem to omit from the task of selecting, transforming and distributing scientific, or powerful, knowledge, perpetuating an assistencialist and constructivist educational model that disregards children’s ability to grasp knowledge beyond the cultural knowledge and contexts in which they are inserted.