Pedagogical documentation and the child's protagonism in early early education: an integrative review

Abstract

This paper discusses the theme pedagogical documentation and the child’s role as a protagonist in early childhood education. Based on a qualitative, bibliographical research approach that used an integrative review method, this study sought to identify the relationships between child’s protagonism and pedagogical documentation that have been explored in Brazilian research published in journal papers on the SciELO Brasil and Capes Journals platforms between 2013 and 2024. As a result, six articles were selected, among which it was identified that two of the studies, based on a Foucauldian perspective, view the child’s protagonism as something dangerous, since, in this context, the teacher occupies a peripheral place, and pedagogical documentation would be a strategy for governing childhood. The remaining studies, based on the dialogue between Italian pedagogy and the perspective of philosophy by Benjamin, start from a view of relational teaching, which conceives children and adults as co-protagonists in the educational process, and pedagogical documentation as a narrative woven between them in the early childhood education context.