Official documents, academic research and pedagogical practices for building the transition between Early Childhood Education and Elementary School

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze the children's transition process from the Early Childhood Education to the Elementary Education in Brazil, based on official documents that provide the educational system with guidelines to their pedagogical work and scientific investigation about the subject. In order to do so, a documental research (analyzing 8 documents produced in the federal sphere and used as reference by the educational system) and bibliographic research (analyzing 23 scientific papers, encompassing articles, dissertations, and theses) were carried out. As results, we highlight that in the field of the legal and academic-scientific discourses, the procedures are considered important so the transition can provide favorable conditions to the children's development; in the field of the pedagogical practices, it is not well concretized. We conjecture as possible root cause of such heterogeneity the way the discourses are built, as they are marked by the scarce interlocution between the different fields. We observe a crystallization of the issues because the analysis of the contributions in both discourses show little transformation as to what is said and what is done. Based on the cultural-historical theory, we see the relevance of the efforts to transform the described landscape, both in terms of the official discourse and of future research, thus highlighting that the concrete conditions to organize and articulate both educational segments can be more or less impactful and fruitful to the children's development.