Initial teacher training and the knowledge base for teaching natural sciences in early childhood education

This article presents a qualitative research, from documentary type, carried out in the period from 2017 to 2019, aimed to unveil what is manifested in the curricular structures of the Pedagogy Degree courses at Federal Public Universities, identifying the knowledge base for Teaching Natural Sciences in Early Childhood Education. For this, a course program and teaching plans analysis from some disciplines of these courses were made. Therefore, it was mainly aimed to present the context in which this research is inserted and to introduce the ideas of Shulman (1986, 1987, 2014), Grossman (1990) and Carlsen (2002) on the aspects related to the constitution of the basis to teach Natural Sciences in Early Childhood Education. An analysis of the corpus is based on elements of Content Analysis (BARDIN, 2016). As a result of the data analysis process, a priori criteria and 6 emerging codes were used, which were distributed in three homonymous categories of knowledge that qualify the basis for teaching. Thus, it appears that all the knowledge of the base is presented in the analyzed disciplines and, also, a model for the knowledge base for Science Teaching in Early Childhood Education was proposed.