This bulletin is the last in the series on the Project that focuses on the interviews carried out in Rocinha. It examines the struggles and opportunities for improving the educational and development conditions for young children growing up in contexts of violence and poverty. The bulletin, written by CIESPI staff members Leandro Castro, Renata Brasil and Eliane Gomes, is based on interviews with sixteen key actors from public, non-profit and private organizations that operate in the community.

CIESPI/PUC-Rio has just issued its 8^th bulletin in the SIPP Project series Participative and Inclusive Early Childhood Education under the title What early childhood teachers think about the opportunities and challenges of early education in their community of Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro. The bulletin is based on interviews with 20 early education teachers and directors in the community, and follows the project’s interest in reflecting on how to improve safety, inclusion and participation in the education centers, in the children’s homes and in the community.

Childhood is the point of departure for all the works of the poet Manoel de Barros. His words connect the adult with the child that used to exist and with all those around him. His poetry is inspired by a curiosity of someone who sees the world for the first time like children do. This is also the task of researchers at CIESPI/PUC-Rio in a new stage of the project Participatory and Inclusive early childhood.In this stage, questions about inclusion, participation and safety were the agenda for creating strategic methods for talking with thirty children between the ages of three and seven who are residents of Rocinha.

With the aim of enlarging the debates arising from the international project Participatory and Inclusive Early Childhood Education, CIESPI/PUC-Rio has just launched its first Policy Brief in the project. In this first bulletin, the authors address the urgent need for more spaces in early childhood education for children 0-3 in Brazil. Malcolm Bush and Renata Brasil summarize data from national and international studies that show the critical importance of investing in the expansion and improvement in quality of early education especially for children who live in contexts of vulnerability.  They also show the large gap between the demand and supply of early education places. 

As part of the Project, CIESPI staff interviewed twenty parents or adults living in the low-income Rio community of Rocinha who were responsible for children aged 0 to 5. The interviews covered a variety of themes relating to the education of the young children in their care. The following account summarizes the adults’ views on the three major topics of the research project. Depending on the circumstances, the adults were either interviewed in person or online using phone or Whatsapp. We note that inclusion and participation are overlapping terms and that the parents’ responses reflect that fact.

This new CIESPI bulletin, the result of a partnership with the University of Edinburgh and several Indian colleague organizations, is titled, Shaping Youth Futures: Youth Livelihood Options in Creating Inclusive Cities. 

CIESPI always tries to contribute something to the communities it engages in research with and this bulletin tracks two such actions in Rocinha. The first action was a collaboration with community and health organizations in the community to promote the vaccination against COVID-19 of younger children. The second was a project to train six young people in the community to listen to and work and play with young children both on-line and in local early childhood education centers.

In bulletin 4 we examine the views of early childhood staff in public, private and blended creches (‘conveniadas’) about their work, COVID, and their relations with the city of Rio.

The project is coordinated by professor Kay Tisdall at the the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and in Brazil by professor Irene Rizzini at CIESPI/PUC-Rio. The aim is to contribute to debates and actions about children and their families in two communities: Rocinha (Rio de Janeiro) and Jardim Catarina (São Gonçalo), both in the state of Rio de Janeiro. The focus is to develop partnerships to improve the state of Early Childhood Education.

In this third project bulletin we discuss the importance of early childhood education, the rights to early childhood education set out in Brazilian law and the major role creches and pre-schools play in children´s lives.