Disputes over the meanings of pedagogical innovation in early childhood education: teachers' discourses on the Farol do Saber e Inovação Móvel

Abstract

This article analyzes the meanings of pedagogical innovation in dispute within the discourses of Early Childhood Education teachers participating in the Farol do Saber e Inovação Móvel, linked to the Projeto Pesquisa-Ação na Escola (PAE), developed within the municipal education system of Curitiba, Brazil. The study is grounded in the understanding that pedagogical innovation operates less as a technical transformation and more as a discursively tensioned practice shaped by conceptions of childhood, teacher education, pedagogical experiences, and institutional expectations regarding digital technologies. The research adopted a qualitative approach and used as discursive corpus the open-ended responses from questionnaires applied to six Early Childhood Education teachers. Data analysis was grounded in French Discourse Analysis, especially the contributions of Orlandi, prioritizing the interpretation of meanings produced in teachers’ discourses about pedagogical innovation. The findings reveal that the meanings attributed to innovation are related to the expansion of children’s investigative experiences, active participation, and the reorganization of pedagogical practices. At the same time, tensions emerged regarding teacher education, inequalities in access to technologies, institutional conditions, and contemporary expectations of permanent pedagogical updating. The study concludes that pedagogical innovation, in the investigated context, constitutes a discursively negotiated construction produced through the relationships among digital technologies, childhood, teaching practices, and disputes concerning legitimate ways of teaching and learning in contemporary Early Childhood Education.