Banca de DEFESA: MARIA JOSE CAMPOS FERREIRA

Remote and hybrid teaching in Early Childhood Education: inclusive pedagogical practices

Inclusive Education; Remote and hybrid teaching; Early Childhood Education; Pedagogical Practice

Enabling the inclusive pedagogical practices in Early Childhood Education during the COVID-19 pandemic became a huge challenge for teachers, school administrators, parents, and the whole scholar community. The motivations for this research emerge from the experiences and personal and professional concerns working as a teacher at the Núcleo da Educação da Infância, Laboratory School from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (NEI-CAp/UFRN) in the COVID-19 pandemic context, during 2020 and 2021, and from the desire of sharing the inclusive pedagogical practices developed in this period and, thus, contributing to the studies related to the education of the childhoods and the teaching practice. This research has the general objective of analyzing how the inclusive pedagogical practices developed with the children regularly registered in the Early Childhood Education (ECE) from NEI-CAp/UFRN during the remote and hybrid schooling context were (re)organized. It also has these specific objectives: to map the factors impacting the effectiveness of inclusive pedagogical practices developed with the ECE children during the remote and hybrid schooling; to identify the remote and hybrid teaching inclusive strategies used by the ECE teachers; to be aware of the the inclusive didactic materials and resources used by the ECE teachers with the children during the remote and hybrid schooling, and develop a collaborative digital portfolio with inclusive pedagogical strategies and didactic resources contributing to the learning of every child, regardless of the remote, hybrid or in-person teaching context. To support this research, we established dialogues with the current inclusive educational policies and pedagogical practices in the ECE inclusive perspective, with the studies and discussions focusing on the teaching practice during the pandemic, including the remote and hybrid teaching, the NEI contextualization and the Historical-Cultural Theory concepts. The investigation adopts a qualitative and descriptive approach and configures itself as a case study. As procedures for data collection and production, we used: the analysis of the institutional documentary sources related to the inclusion and to the emergency remote and hybrid schooling period, and semi-structured interviews conducted online via Google Meet with female teachers and coordinators. We invited two coordinators from the institution and three teachers who worked in Early Childhood Education during 2020 and 2021 to participate in the research. The data was analyzed based on textual discourse analysis. In the analysis, we highlighted the categories of pedagogical practice organization and mediations. At the time, the investigation identified four different teaching models: emergency remote teaching model with asynchronous meanings and non mandatory living experiences suggestions to be performed and mediated by the families; remote teaching model with synchronous and asynchronous meanings with the mediation of the teachers and the families; remote teaching model with daily synchronous meanings and, at last, the hybrid model. These models served to produce collaboratively with the teachers participating in the research a digital portfolio to share pedagogical strategies and didactic resources used to contribute to the learning of every child. For believing in the necessity and importance of sharing successful pedagogical practices, this study aims to socialize how they were developed and experienced in the ECE during the remote and hybrid teaching period and how they can contribute to the inclusion of every child in other contexts.