Peer-reviewed article
Curriculum and early childhood education: a systematic review
Carla Ireni Borges Rodrigues, Silvana Peterini Boeira, Vanderlei Folmer ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This systematic review examines how early childhood education curriculum has been studied and discussed by researchers in Brazil and internationally. The review analyzed 30 articles and organized findings into four main categories: curriculum and early childhood education, the lived curriculum, the Brazilian national curriculum framework, and the challenge of recognizing childhood times. The review identifies recurring problems in early childhood education that have persisted throughout its history and remain relevant in both Brazilian and international contexts.
Key points
- The review identified four conceptual categories from the literature on early childhood education curriculum
- Persistent problems in early childhood education have challenged teachers and researchers historically
- The Brazilian National Common Curricular Base for Children's Education (BNCC-EI) is a key focus area in recent curriculum discussions
- The concept of 'lived curriculum' is distinguished as separate from formal curriculum frameworks
- Similar curriculum problems are identified across both Brazilian and international early childhood education contexts
Limitations
The review synthesizes other studies but does not present new empirical data or evaluate any specific intervention. It does not report on outcomes or effectiveness for children, making it a descriptive analysis of the research landscape rather than evidence of what works to improve child well-being.
Abstract
ABSTRACT This review was undertaken with the objective of knowing how the curriculum of early childhood education has been problematized by national and international researchers. Once the stages of delimitation of the research universe were concluded, the research corpus was constituted of 30 articles, between national and international. After analyzing the productions, they were grouped by semantic approximation, thus originating four conceptual categories: curriculum and early childhood education; the lived curriculum; early childhood education and the Brazilian National Common Curricular Base for Children's Education (BNCC-EI); the challenge of accepting childhood times. The similarity of the identified problems, their aggravating factors, the perpetuation of some of them, having challenged teachers and researchers throughout the history of early childhood education, underlie and provide, in themselves, a rich, forceful and representative material of the reality of early childhood education in the Brazilian and international context.