14 de July de 2026
The Ministry of Education (MEC) held, on March 14 and 15, 2023, the seminar Literacy in Brazil: pedagogical milestones, assessment, and learning monitoring, with the aim of discussing ways to ensure that all Brazilian children are literate at the right age, developing the knowledge and skills necessary to read, understand, and produce written texts. At the Capes headquarters in Brasília, teachers, researchers, and class entities discussed the need to address inequalities in learning opportunities, projecting better indicators in the national Education assessment system. The event was the starting point and the first step in a series of conversation circles and actions between public management, higher education institutions, and members of civil society, which resulted in the launch of the National Commitment for Child Literacy.
Representing the Laboratório de Educação, the only third-sector institution to participate in the seminar, directors Andrea Guida and Nicole Paulet Piedra were part of the panel Literacy in process: formative assessment and classroom management, and revisited data from a study conducted in 2013, during the first year of implementation of the National Pact for Literacy at the Right Age (PNAIC). The results presented provide insights into the teaching and assessment practices for reading and writing carried out by the teachers participating in this national continuing education policy.
Conducted in partnership with the MEC and the UNESCO representation in Brazil, the research focused on evaluating tools and instruments that allowed for monitoring not only the design but also the actual appropriation by the different actors involved in one of the main training programs promoted by the federal government in recent decades. At that time, given the concern for the sustainability of the investment and the understanding of the specificity and complementarity of the different professional roles within the educational networks, a report was prepared that sought to address the inner workings of the system to make this public policy viable.
From the more than 400-page result, an excerpt was taken to engage directly with the approach of the seminar in Brasília in 2023, 10 years after its implementation. Based on this connection, the Laboratório de Educação recognized elements that, over the years, have reappeared in the territories where it works, concluding that the practice of monitoring the implementation of current policies through research focusing on the appropriation processes by teachers—both regarding teaching content and the ways of teaching and assessing them—is fundamental to fostering the creation of training processes that support the consolidation of these practices with greater intentionality.
At the opening panel of the seminar, Kátia Schweickardt, the National Secretary of Basic Education at the MEC, stated that a collaboration regime between the Federal Government, states, and municipalities is necessary to implement the literacy program in the country. “We don’t want to do something that is imposed on realities, but rather, in these listening processes to build the policy, be able to support good initiatives and agree on metrics so that we can understand how these children are developing their cognitive processes.”
Throughout 2023, Labedu contributed to the construction of the National Commitment for Child Literacy, a program that establishes the foundations of the national literacy policy, participating in a series of technical meetings related to the design of training actions for Early Childhood Education and the first meeting of the National Network for Articulation of Management, Training, and Mobilization (Renalfa) in June of the same year.
The dialogue established throughout the formulation of the National Commitment for Child Literacy was based on a democratic vision that recognizes the protagonism and the need for cooperation with municipal and state school networks, within the scope of the collaboration regime, as well as the mobilization of partners with high technical capacity and experience grounded in the Brazilian educational reality for the design, implementation, monitoring, and continuous evaluation of the actions and programs that structure the Commitment.
The participation of the Laboratório de Educação in the planning process of training actions for education professionals (assistants, teachers, pedagogical coordinators, school principals, education department technicians) culminated in support for the State Government of Maranhão’s Department of Education for the implementation of the Commitment in the state through the projects Learning to Study Texts and Learning: Inside and Outside of School throughout 2024.
In the MEC’s assessment, the “Laboratório de Educação methodology combines rigorous scientific grounding in language sciences and developmental and learning psychology with a strategic, contextualized, and emancipatory vision of the permanent training of education professionals.”
To learn more about the National Commitment for Child Literacy, access the booklet here.