Entre interações e brincadeiras: a educação em Ciências orientada para a alfabetização científica na educação infantil

Abstract

Early Childhood Education (ECE), as the first stage of basic education, is essential for children's development, serving as the foundation for subsequent educational stages. The Brazilian National Common Curricular Base (BNCC) proposes that interactions and play be the pillars of this phase, as it is through them—in contact with peers, teachers, pedagogical activities, and nature—that children learn, develop, and socialize. This research, grounded in Lev Semionovitch Vygotsky’s (1896–1934) Historical-Cultural Theory, investigated how interactions and play occur in ECE from the perspective of scientific knowledge acquisition. We sought to answer the following questions: “What Science Teaching (ST) actions have been carried out by teachers in ECE, particularly with preschool children?” and “How do they perceive, from the standpoint of science education, the attention given to the rights of learning and development contained in ECE’s structuring axes (interactions and play)?” This qualitative research is based on an exploratory approach, and data were organized and interpreted using Discursive Textual Analysis (DTA). Data construction was based on ongoing dialogue accompanying the educational process with six teachers in three Municipal Early Childhood Education Centers (CEMEIs) in the public school system of Uberaba, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Among the results, we observed that interactions and play developed in ECE—when guided by Science Teaching practices—significantly contribute to the initial steps of children’s Scientific Literacy (SL), fostering curiosity and investigative thinking through playful and everyday experiences. The teachers recognize the importance of science education at this stage, understanding children as epistemic subjects capable of producing meaning and hypotheses based on their lived experiences, provided their cultural specificities and individual learning styles are respected. However, they also report a lack of theoretical and methodological support to guide their practices, highlighting the absence of specific training and adequate materials as barriers to the implementation of more structured proposals. This gap underscores the need to invest in teacher education through initiatives that address Scientific Literacy and consider the real contexts of teaching practice in ECE.