Práticas de educação especial na educação infantil o atendimento educacional especializado na creche e pré-escola

Abstract

With the gradual increase in enrollment of children from 0 to 5 years and 11 months in daycare centers and preschools, and the understanding that Early Childhood Education is a fundamental right of the child and their family, the process of including children with disabilities from infancy has been seen as a recent and urgent challenge. The scarcity of studies on the nature of providing Specialized Educational Assistance that respects childhood and children results in the adoption of a service model transposed from Elementary Education and mostly carried out in Multifunctional Resource Rooms, disregarding the specificities of the curriculum at this stage of education. Within this scenario emerges the problematic of this study: What practices have special education teachers developed in Early Childhood Education institutions? With this question in mind, the general objective of this research was to understand the practices of the special education teacher in an Early Childhood Education institution, with specific objectives to identify, describe, and analyze these practices. For this purpose, qualitative research was conducted through a case study at an Early Childhood Education Center in the municipality of Maceio/AL, which offers Specialized Educational Assistance in a Multifunctional Resource Room for babies and children with disabilities. The use of various investigative instruments, articulated in the analysis of the data produced during the research, led us to adopt the methodology of data triangulation. Instruments for data production included non-structured interviews, observations of the pedagogical practice of the special education teacher in the Multifunctional Resource Room, group discussions, and analysis of guiding documents for Special Education in the municipality of Maceió. Based on the findings and data analysis guided by studies conducted by authors such as Carvalho (2011, 2014), Carvalho and Fochi (2017), Kishimoto (1999), Calheiros and Fumes (2014), Mercado (2016, 2021, 2022), Oliveira (2010, 2020), Fonseca (2021), and Falco (2022), we found that the clinical view of disability stands out in various statements, in diagnostic actions observed in Specialized Educational Assistance practices supported by guiding documents as assessment models that seek to measure the child's pedagogical development, disregarding play and interactions as curricular axes of Early Childhood Education. This corroborates the hypothesis that Specialized Educational Assistance in daycare centers and preschools is characterized as a duplication of Specialized Educational Assistance in Elementary Education. Furthermore, the absence of training in pedagogical practices aimed at children and babies targeted by Special Education was noted. Such training gaps distance the formation of a professional identity of a special education teacher in Early Childhood Education coherent with an inclusive practice that perceives babies and children with disabilities as active agents of their own development and producers of cultures. Thus, this research, by facilitating the discussion between the practice of Specialized Educational Assistance for babies and children with disabilities and the Early Childhood Education curriculum, provokes the urgency of rethinking these pedagogical practices in the inclusive vein through dialogue between Special Education, Childhoods, children, curriculum, and Early Childhood Education.