Avaliação da Estratégia Unidade Amiga da Primeira Infância: experiência de avaliação institucional em unidades de educação infantil de Fortaleza

Abstract

This study is an evaluative research on the implementation of the Early Childhood Friendly Unit (UAPI) strategy, which is an action integrated into the early childhood education policy of the municipal network of Fortaleza – CE, developed in partnership with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). UAPI is a multiple strategy of institutional evaluation understood as a process of assessment, analysis and decision-making, promoting self-reflection among professionals regarding the actions they carry out in the daily life of school units. Thus, with the general objective of evaluating the implementation of UAPI and its contributions to the qualification of practices and to the culture of institutional evaluation in school units, this research was conducted from the perspective of in-depth evaluation created by Rodrigues (2008), evaluation of public policies based on four dimensions of analysis: content analysis, context analysis, institutional trajectory analysis, and temporal and territorial spectrum analysis. Allied to the evaluative perspective is a qualitative approach, using interviews and questionnaires, and documentary analysis as the main data collection instruments. Among the findings, the evaluation of early childhood education emerges as a challenge still experienced today, with institutional evaluation being an important perspective that has become the object of study in several research projects; there is a strong influence of local culture on the UAPI implementation processes; in the institutional transit, as evidenced by the interviewees, UAPI undergoes a reconfiguration of meanings where, understood as an external requirement, it comes to be understood as an instrument of reflective self-evaluation and validation of practices; the research also reveals an implementation centered on the coordinator; that UAPI, according to participants, was capable of provoking various changes whether in teachers' attitudes, in record-keeping practices, and in the visibility of pedagogical actions, configuring itself as a strategy capable of bringing contributions to qualified practice. Regarding UAPI's contributions to the culture of institutional evaluation, the research reveals that there was a transition from absence to the practice of systematized institutional evaluation, but that it still does not constitute a concrete change, the result of changes in beliefs, ideas and convictions capable of transcending UAPI's existence.