20 de October de 2026
Early childhood education must ensure that children have opportunities to develop language as a tool for thinking and learning throughout life, far beyond the process of learning to read and write. This was stated by Nicole Paulet, Executive Director of LabEdu, during a meeting promoted by the Laboratory of Studies and Research in Education and Social Economy (Lepes) at USP, in partnership with the Institute of Advanced Studies (IEA) of the University.
The meeting, moderated by Camila Martins, is part of Lepes’ series of debates on literacy and also brought together Renata Frauendorf, from Instituto Avisa Lá, and Márcia Bernardes, from the São Paulo State Department of Education. The topic revisits the debate opened in August, when Beatriz Cardoso, LabEdu’s strategic advisor, argued that literacy means introducing the child to written culture and to the world of knowledge.
Nicole returned to this conceptual discussion and proposed thinking about literacy from a perspective that considers the interrelationship between orality, reading, and writing. Viewed in this way, the process begins in early childhood education and is deepened throughout schooling, rather than being limited to first and second grade. For the director, understanding literacy only as decoding narrows the horizon of public policy. “How can we ensure that the minimum does not become the ceiling of what we aspire to build for children’s educational trajectories?”, she asked.
To explain how language develops, she presented the distinction between linguistic input and output: what the child hears and processes through the interactions in which they participate, and what they produce when speaking and writing. According to her, these two dimensions continuously reinforce one another. “For children to develop language, they need to take part in meaningful situations of language use that are intentionally planned, such as play, songs, read-alouds, and conversations. Children who do not have access to this outside school, because they are in vulnerable contexts, need to have this right guaranteed within it,” she said.
At the end of her remarks, Nicole presented LabEdu’s perspective on monitoring as part of a broader structure, intertwined with ongoing professional development and model planning frameworks, which together sustain implementation at scale precisely to ensure the right of all children. According to the director, this combination enables those who provide training to also track how practices reach schools and how they develop across different territories. “Monitoring with a formative perspective—how practices are arriving and what we can do with that,” she said, referring to LabEdu’s experience in Maranhão.
Watch the full presentation: