Conceptualising quality early childhood education:Learning from young children in Brazil and South Africa through creative and play-based methods

Early childhood has increasingly been acknowledged as a vital time for all children. Inclusive and quality education is part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, with the further specification that all children have access to quality pre-primary education. As early childhood education (ECE) has expanded worldwide, so have concerns about the quality of ECE provision, including whether its pedagogy is culturally meaningful and contextually appropriate. While these issues are much debated in themselves, often missing is a key stakeholder group for such discussions: young children. Young children have critical insights and perspectives of key importance for ensuring quality ECE. This article addresses how quality ECE can be conceptualised, through reflections on creative and play-based methods with young children, used in a cross-national project titled Safe Inclusive Participative Pedagogy. The article draws on community case studies undertake by two of the country teams in Brazil and South Africa. In contexts where children's participation is not necessarily familiar in ECE settings nor understood by key stakeholders, the fieldwork shows that children can express their views and experiences through using creative and play-based methods. We argue that these methods can become part of a critical pedagogy through ECE settings, where ECE practitioners, children and other key stakeholders engage in ongoing, challenging and transformative dialogue. In turn, critical pedagogy has the potential to strengthen local practices, challenge top-down approach, and foster quality safe, inclusive, participative early years education.</p

Children’s Perceptions about their Cities: Reflections on Methodological Approaches

The issue of child participation has been the subjetct of debates and systematic studies since the time of the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and, in Brazil, since the adoption of the Statute on the Child and the Adolescent (1990). The right to participation comprises a number of aspects including the right to a freedom of speech that incorporates respect for the voices and points of view of children and youth. Taking into account this background, our paper proposes a reflection on two ongoing projects. In both cases, photographs and videos were used as advantaged resources in the investigations. The goal is to reflect on what methodologies nurture connections among researchers, teachers, and children and allows new insights to be gained. The results of this study are in line with the literature that focuses on the requirements of research involving meaningful children’s participation