Dez dimensões da qualidade em educação infantil: um diagnóstico de instituições públicas de Fortaleza

Abstract

The Brazilian education has acquired important conquests, especially in respect to the access to the school. Despite this, these conquests have not guaranteed educational quality in our institutions. Our data are based on ten structural dimensions of quality - Goals and objectives, experiences of leaming/curriculum, strategies of education and learning, planning, evaluation of records, organization of the technical team, physical space, relations and interactions, even opportunities, relative's partnership and family and community engagement, management and evaluation utilized by the Child's Association of Portugal. The question that guided our work was: How these domains are being contemplated in infantile institutions from the municipal public network in Fortaleza? We have applied as theoretical framework, the conceptions on the infantile development ofPiaget and Vygotsky and the ecology ofthe human development of Bronfenbrenner, because they emphasize the importance of the contexts and their interrelationships for the development of the individual. In orderto improve our data colletion, we have applied ten key-aspects of the infantile s education quality, proposed by Zabalza and the criteria for an attendance in day-care centers that respects the basic rights of the child, established for Campos. The dialogue with these authors was used to support our objectives in order to identify, diagnosis and analyze these dimensions of quality. We have chosen amongst different qualitative research approaches, the case study. We have conducted the research enrolling children aging four to tive years in two institutions that provided to different forms of attendance - an Infantile Education Center and a Child Education Unit. We establish the research procedures and necessary instruments for dimension analysis, as follows: comments, records and interviews. We have challenged ourselves to use, additionally, two novel research instruments that are: the child involvement scale and the adult engagement scale. We could identify amid ten dimensions of the quality, none was contemplated in a satisfactory fashion. In both institutions, environrnental spaces did not offer safety and unlikely were organized to enhance leaming. None of these two schools proposed goals have been reached and so objectives necessary to guide the institutional work have failed. Furthermore, we could not recognize the managing nucleus. We evidence that the technical teams ofthe two institutions were not able to use any instruments to monitor and to evaluate the quality of a given attendance. In both institutions, the criteria for team management has not been found, nor a project of continued formation. Teachers of both schools did not follow any educational planning; therefore they did not elaborate any learning strategies, compromising the learning experiences of the children. In addition, no forrn systematic evaluation was found. Teachers do not seem to be aware of the necessity to provi de same opportunities around the school space. The two institutions need to create a space of dialogue among professionals, educators and especially the children, profoundly affected from this. The relation with the family is limited to the moments of children delivery in the school. The focused institutions did not make systematic meetings with family members to argue the child development. In conclusion, in order to guarantee a better service to our children is imperative to follow a coordinated effort to contemplate the ten dimension ofthe quality.