The Brazilian Common Core Curriculum for Early Childhood Education: An Innovative and Culturally Relevant Approach


Executive Summary

The Brazilian Common Core Curriculum for Early Childhood Education (BNCCEI, in Portuguese) is an innovative proposal, as it is a curricular arrangement which comprises the concrete situations and experiences of children´s daily lives and their knowledge, intertwining them with the knowledge that is part of the cultural heritage. To support the elaboration and implementation of the National Curricular Common Base (BNCC, in Portuguese) for the stages of basic education, the Ministry of Education (MEC, in Portuguese) instituted the Support programme for the Implementation of the National Common Curriculum Base (ProBNCC, in Portuguese), establishing guidelines, parameters and criteria for this implementation. Through ProBNCC, the Ministry of Education provided technical and financial assistance to the State Departments of Education (SEDUCs, in Portuguese), to work in collaboration with the municipalities of their respective federative units.

Ministry / Service / Organization in charge
Ministry of Education
Themes of the WCECCE
Media

Implementation

Technical and financial support at all stages from the preparation of the BNCC to its implementation and monitoring. Since the public hearings, which began in 2014; hiring a team of specialists who prepared the versions of the BNCC, financial transfers to the SEDUCs to prepare their curricular references aligned with the BNCC, teacher education and, in 2020, the beginning of the process of monitoring the implementation. For this action, the Ministry of Education, through its Basic Education Secretariat (SEB, in Portuguese), hired the Center for Public Policies and Education Evaluation of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (CAEd/UFJF, in Portuguese) to carry out a national survey that has already heard almost 50 thousand leaders and education professionals. The monitoring survey is available at plataformabncc.mec.gov.br.


Stakeholders and partners involved

There are currently 8,973,079 enrollments in Early Childhood Education. There are currently 5007 municipalities registered on the BNCC platform, and 4522 registered curricula. The ProBNCC was created together with the Ministry of Education, the National Council of Secretaries of Departments of Education (CONSED, in Portuguese) and the National Union of Municipal Managers of Education (UNDIME, in Portuguese), which form the National Implementation Committee of the BNCC. Civil Society organizations and institutional representations of National, State and Municipal Councils participate, namely the National Council of Education (CNE, in Portuguese), National Forum of State Councils of Education (FONCEDE, in Portuguese) and the National Union of Municipal Education Councils (UNCME, in Portuguese).


Impact

The BNCC for Early Childhood Education has brought significant innovations in the following dimensions: Child´s view: Historical and rights subject who, in the interactions, relationships and daily practices that he experiences, builds his personal and collective identity, plays, imagines, fantasizes, desires, learns, observes, experiences, narrates, questions, and builds meanings about the nature and society, producing culture. Understanding of learning and development rights: ensure the conditions for children to learn in situations in which they can play an active role in environments that invite them to experience challenges and feel provoked to solve them and in which they can build meanings about oneself, others, and the social and natural world. Interactions and Play are structuring axes for the promotion of essential learning that comprise behaviors, skills, knowledge, and experiences that promote learning and development in different fields of experience.


EDP 001 - Brazil 3

Innovations

Transforming the Curriculum: Shifting from Teacher-Centric to Child-Centric Perspective

The BNCC changes the focus of the curriculum from the teacher´s perspective to the children´s perspective. Structures learning contexts guided by a pedagogical project articulated to children´s skills and meanings constructed by them using different languages.Changes the vision of time and space in the implementation of the curriculum. By ensuring that all children have time to explore the propositions that the teacher makes and understand that they need to repeat this same proposition in order to appropriate certain actions and make sense of the lived experience. Not to define the pedagogical process as goals that are imposed on the child, neglecting the meaning that that process has in the child´s experience. Reject any pedagogical posture (including instructions, teaching materials, stories) of rigidity and inflexibility, without paying attention to the way children react.It determines interactions and games as the structuring axes of pedagogical practicesby defining learning and development rights; proposing learning and development objectives organized by fields of experience and age groups and emphasizes the need to imprint educational intentionality on pedagogical practices and to monitor the progression of learning and development.


Constraints

The challenge in implementing the BNCC is Brazil´s continental dimensions and regional particularities. However, the MEC made resources available for implementation until 2024, to decentralize and reach the largest number of professionals in teacher training.


Collaborative Partnership for Educational Improvement

The ProBNCC was created together with the Ministry of Education, the National Council of Secretaries of Departments of Education (CONSED, in Portuguese) and the National Union of Municipal Managers of Education (UNDIME, in Portuguese), which form the National Implementation Committee of the BNCC. Civil Society organizations and institutional representations of National, State and Municipal Councils participate, namely the National Council of Education (CNE, in Portuguese), National Forum of State Councils of Education (FONCEDE, in Portuguese) and the National Union of Municipal Education Councils (UNCME, in Portuguese). Such an action was only possible with a strong regime of collaboration between entities around a common object: the improvement of education.