Gender, sex and sexuality in early childhood education: what the documents of the municipal network of Florianopolis say

Abstract

The present text is a of a research, at the level of specialization, which had the problem and objective to locate, in the documents of the Municipal Network of Education of Florianopolis, conceptions regarding gender, sex and sexuality. To achieve this goal, the methodology used was qualitative documentary research in selected documents: a) National Curricular Guidelines for Early Childhood Education (2009); b) Curricular Guidelines for Early Childhood Education of the Municipal Education Network of Florianopolis (2012); c) Infant Education Curriculum of the Municipal Education Network of Florianopolis (2015). For the analyses, we used the Content Analysis Technique to locate the presence and / or absence of the keywords selected for the search in the documents: children, girls, boys, diversity, gender, sex, sexuality, masculine, feminine, masculinity, femininity, woman and man. For the analyses of the theoretical references of studies on gender and sexuality, especially those dealing with this issue in educational contexts were rescued. The analyses indicate that some of these words are used to universalize a given subject, others are not contained in some documents, and others are reducing their use from one document to another. What is evident is that the use of words is not neutral and reveals conceptions and reproduces stereotypes.