Currículo dos Anos Iniciais do Ensino Fundamental: abordagens em produções brasileiras e percepções de um grupo de professores

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how teachers understand and implement the school curriculum in their daily pedagogical practices in two public schools in a municipality in the north of Minas Gerais. The dissertation was developed in a multipaper format. The first article of a bibliographic nature and adopting a “State of Knowledge” approach, analyzed the works presented in Working Group 12 – Curriculum, at the ANPEd meetings. Its objective was to identify the findings of studies discussing the curriculum of the early years of elementary education, presented at ANPEd meetings from 2000 to 2023, focusing on the democratization of education and teachers’ pedagogical practices. The second article, with a qualitative approach, involved six teachers in focus group discussions conducted from a semi-structured script. It sought to investigate the perceptions of teachers from an urban school with grade-level classes and a rural school with multi-grade organization, in a municipality in the north of Minas Gerais, regarding curriculum prescription and implementation. The results indicate that teachers understand the curriculum both as a normative instrument and as a space for critical action and reinterpretation, especially considering concrete working conditions and diverse contexts. The discussions revealed tensions between the standardization promoted by official documents - such as the BNCC and the Minas Gerais Reference Curriculum -and the need for adaptation to local realities, emphasizing the importance of public policies sensitive to territorial specificities. Both studies indicate that listening to teachers and valuing situated practices are essential for constructing a more contextualized, participatory, and meaningful curriculum. Strengthening pedagogical autonomy and recognizing the complexity of teaching work contributes to a broader education for students and to the improvement of educational practices. The articulation between theoretical research and field investigation enabled a more comprehensive understanding of the curriculum as a social practice in constant negotiation between the prescribed and the lived. On the one hand, the findings highlight the need for greater investment in research focused on this stage of education; on the other, they reveal that teachers recognize the prescribed curriculum as non-neutral and that its formality remains distant from everyday practice