"Literate Playing”—An Oral Language Empowerment Strategy for Underprivileged Children

Abstract

This article describes an ongoing collaborative action research study, and presents initial observations of the outcomes of teachers' interventions in early childhood education centres in a major Brazilian city. Designed as a professional development initiative, the action research is based on a view of a quality program being one that offers both playbased learning and linguistically enriching experiences for children and opportunities for professional learning of its professionals to support those same programs in a personal, self-confident, and collective manner. It presents initial observations of the outcomes of teachers' interventions in four non-governmental early childhood education centres, and some implications the results can suggest for the NOW Play Project. IntroductionInvestment in the first three years of life-whether through educational programs or isolated actions with families-has become one of the priorities of Brazilian government policies in the last decade. The complementarity of Brazil between education and careand integrity in the development of the child in daycare centres-became a childhood policy since 1988 with the New Democratic Laws (Brasil, 1988).Since then, children became represented to society as capable instead in need of care. ECE became children's right for education and care as citizens. (Nunes et al., 2011). The most recent legal document that defines the National Curriculum Guidelines for Early Childhood Education (Brasil, 2010) points to giving priority to discussions on how to guide the development of children's play and oral language, as well as recognizing their participation in the cultural world as well as the importance of development of children in daycare centres. Although discourses change, few policies have been made: coverage rate is still 25.6%, which represents only 3.2 million Brazilian children, revealing a substantial space for expansion of supply, especially for the poorest children. Only 21.9% of children enrolled in daycare centres come from 25% of the poorest Brazilian families that need more educational and care attention and who remain at home in absolute poverty (Brasil, 2017).When it comes to public daycare centres that enrolled most of the poor children, Brazil still faces major challenges to establish and implement quality programs consistent with the legal frameworks for early childhood education of the new Brazilian democracy. Recent studies on the quality of daycare centres in Brazil (Campos et al., 2011) reveals weak implementation of the Ministry of Education's mandatory guidelines and quality standards (e.g.,