1 Special Education and Daycare

The organization of Brazilian Special Education in the perspective of inclusive education has generated regulatory documents and studies that aim to collaborate on the different fronts related to the area, among them teacher education, design of practices, organization of spaces. In relation to Special Education, history shows a trajectory with many changes resulting from the advancement of knowledge in health, education and social areas on disabilities, teaching and learning practices, citizens' rights and the duties of public authorities, among others.

Literature indicates that the educational service to children with disabilities, with global developmental disorders and with high skills/giftedness⁸ has already followed a model based on medical concepts (^{Mrech, 1999}; ^{Vitta, 2010}; D. R. P. ^{Nunes & Araújo, 2014}). At present, efforts are being made to understand the child, regardless of his/her specific needs, as a subject who has his or her rights guaranteed. These changes are affirmed by different documents, among them the Statute of the Child and Adolescent - ECA, Law no. 8.069/1990 (^{Lei nº. 8069, 1990}), the World Declaration on Education for All (^{United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural [UNESCO], 1990}) and the Declaration of Salamanca (^{UNESCO, 1994}). The other documents produced in sequence considered and dealt with Special Education, helping in the discussion and implementation of conditions that promote education for all.

In 2008, the National Policy on Special Education was published in the perspective of Inclusive Education⁹ (2008, p. 14), aiming

[...] to ensure the inclusion of schoolchildren with disabilities, global developmental disorders and high skills/giftedness, guiding education systems to ensure: access to regular education with participation, learning and continuity at the highest levels of education; transversality of the special education modality from early childhood education to higher education; offering specialized educational services; teacher education for specialized educational services and other education professionals for inclusion; family and community participation; architectural access on transportation, furniture, communications and information; and intersectoral articulation in the implementation of public policies.

The policy implemented based on this document changes the substitutive character of Special Education to common teaching, becoming a complementary modality with transversality in all stages, levels and modalities. It provides guidelines to ensure access and permanence of students in the classes of the regular education network with the offer of Specialized Educational Service (SES) in reverse shift to the regular school, in multifunctional resource spaces in the same unit or in another that provides this service (^{MEC, 2013}).

Although there is an effort to attend students with disabilities, with global developmental disorders and with high skills/giftedness, we find in different documents that this does not happen equitably in the different stages of education, especially in the daycare phase. Public policies for Early Childhood Education began to change after the 1988 Constitution, but gained legal force as of 1996, with the National Education Guidelines and Framework Law (known as LDB) - Law no. 9,394 of December 20, 1996 - which places the Early Childhood Education as part of Basic Education, consisting of two phases: daycare (zero to three years and 11 months) and pre-school (four to five years). Other documents were organized to assist in the development of this educational stage, always with greater emphasis on pre-school, which became mandatory in 2013.

Daycare does not receive the same attention, both in official documents and in research in the area (^{Rosemberg, 2012}), and continues with an emphasis on assistance. However, several authors point out the importance of the educational institution for the development of the child from zero to three years old, both for the promotion of development and for the prevention of deficits for those considered vulnerable by their social condition (^{Campos, Esposito, Bhering, Gimenes, & Abuchaim, 2011}; M. F. R. ^{Nunes, Corsino, & Didonet, 2011}; ^{Vitta & Vitta, 2012}), a fact that highlights the need for transversality of Special Education in this phase. ^{Vitta, Silva, and Zaniolo (2016)} verified incipient proposals, in addition to the lack of research related to Special Education and inclusion in daycare. In the analysis of the official documents regarding education for all in the daycare (Referencial Curricular Nacional para a Educação Infantil - National Curriculum Guidelines for Early Childhood Education - 1998; National Education Plan - PNE - 2000-2010; Law no. 13,005 - PNE of 2014; Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais para a Educação Básica - National Curricular Guidelines for Basic Education - of 2013), these authors highlight:

The analysis of these texts allowed us to verify that there is great difficulty in implementing a quality proposal for Early Childhood Education that contemplates education for all, since there is a range of factors interfering in the organization of a practice based on consistent aspects. The difficulties of the process of inclusion of children with disabilities, global developmental disorders and high skills/giftedness in daycare are added to others, related to this phase of Early Childhood Education and to the institution itself, such as its objectives and purposes, definition of its contents and dynamics, financing, professionals' education, among others. Therefore, it is in the discussion about the role of daycare that it should be included and deepen the relation between the function of this institution and the need to offer education for all, thus allowing the purpose guaranteed by law for Early Childhood Education, in order to provide integral development to the child, is actually put into practice (^{Vitta et al., 2016}, p. 23).

According to the National Policy on Special Education in the Perspective of Inclusive Education (2008, p. 13):

In the area of early childhood education, enrollments are concentrated in the special schools/classes that register 89,083 students, while only 24,005 are enrolled in common classes, contrary to studies in this area that affirm the benefits of coexistence and learning among children with and without disabilities since the early years for their development.

In order to help understand this situation, we sought to verify how the enrollments are in a more current context. The data provided by the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (INEP), in the document Censo Escolar da Educação Básica 2016 - Notas Estatísticas¹⁰ (School Census of Basic Education 2016 - Statistical notes), show enrollments of students in Early Childhood Education for the year 2016. In that year, Brazil had a total of 5,034,353 children in preschool and 3,233,739 in daycare. Regarding the Special Education situation in this context, the report does not provide data per phase of education, but rather includes all Basic Education: 174,886 enrolled exclusively in Special Education and 796,485 Inclusive Education students.

The latest data presented by this body, which make it possible to visualize the separation by the phases of Basic Education, refer to the technical summary of the 2013 census¹¹, with a total of 16,977 enrolled in special classes and exclusive schools and 42,982 inclusive education students in regular classes. The document shows the enrollments from 2007 to 2013 and makes a percentage comparison between 2012 and 2013, showing the reduction of enrollments in special classes and exclusive schools (-9.0%) and the increase of inclusive education students in common classes (6.2 %).

The data that allow us to separate the two phases of Early Childhood Education are still gross and refer to the school census of 2014. We opted for results that show the total number of enrollments in regular education, Early Childhood Education and special assistance (for those who have some special needs, that is, inclusive education students), and enrollments in Special Education, Early Childhood Education stage. The results can be seen in Table 1.

Table 1 shows that, in 2014, the population of students with disabilities, with global developmental disorders and high skills/giftedness included (regular education with special assistance) in relation to the number of children enrolled in regular education represented 0.4 % of daycare and 0.7% of preschool. The number of children with disabilities, with developmental disorders and high skills/gifted assisted by the educational system that year was 17,597 in daycare and 61,374 in the pre-school. Of this total, the percentage of enrolled in regular education was 66.2% in daycare and 58.4% in pre-school, which suggests that many children were still cared for in different institutions and that are part of Special Education.

Although the number of children enrolled in daycare is lower than in pre-school, we perceive a small advantage in terms of inclusion, probably due to the special educational requirements at each stage. However, is that so? This and other issues need to be answered, as many of the problems already identified on the two fronts - Early Childhood Education and Special Education - are currently in a single situation, with emphasis on daycare.

The production of research in the area is a way to make questions and try to answer them, committed to improving the quality of services offered to this stage of education. As a result, some questions are raising investigation at the moment: What has been produced in the scientific area in relation to education for all in daycare? What themes have the researchers been worried about in the area? What are the main contributions that these studies give to the problem of inclusion in daycare? Thus, the objective of this paper is to describe the scientific production in the area of Special Education on the educational assistance to the age group from zero to three years, initial phase of Early Childhood Education, in the last 25 years.

2 Methodology

This research is exploratory, since it aims to "provide greater familiarity with the problem" (^{Gil, 2002}, p. 41), and it is defined as follows: How have scientific productions studied Special Education in the age range of zero to three years old? To answer this question, we used the descriptive bibliographic research, developed on the basis of already elaborated material, such as papers, doctoral dissertations and master's thesis. In order to do that, we used the databases of the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), the Electronic Periodicals in Psychology (PePSIC), the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES)/Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC) Journal Portal, the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (known as BDTD), and Red de Revistas Científicas da América Latina Y el Caribe, España y Portugal (REDALYC). In the advanced search of the Bases, the cutoff period was between 1993 and 2017, that is, the last 25 years, and we used the following combination of descriptors: "educação especial x creche; educação inclusiva x creche; inclusão x creche" (special education vs daycare; inclusive education vs daycare; inclusion vs daycare).

All the material found was placed in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets according to the searched database and the descriptors, including the following information: name of the text; type (paper, thesis or dissertation); year of publication; keywords; abstract; authors and, in the case of theses and dissertations, program and location.

The first stage of the study consisted of an exploratory reading of the material to verify if the work was of interest to the research, based on the following criteria: treat the subject of Special or Inclusive Education in daycare in a complete way for reading in PDF format. Also repeated papers were eliminated within the same base, through the data crossing, because several papers have both "special education" and "inclusive education" descriptors.

In a second stage, we checked for duplicated documents between the databases. Then, we carried out the selective reading of the abstracts to examine the coherence of the texts for the purpose of this research. We selected only those documents that had Special Education (or Inclusive) in daycare in Brazil. We excluded those that, in relation to the Early Childhood Education, did not talk about daycare. To do this, we used the search tool of the PDF documents and entered the descriptors daycare, babies, small children, and also looked for references to the age group. The documents that were eliminated did not consider the specificities of daycare, which differ from pre-school and did not meet our proposal to focus on the educational phase from zero to three years old with their particularities. Table 2 below shows the numbers related to the two stages and the final numbers per base.

Table 2 shows the initial and final numbers of the crossings of the descriptors by database in the first stage, that went from 2,118 to 117 documents, after removing those that were not related to the subject and that were repeated. After the second stage, the number was reduced to 23.

REDALYC is a database that has specific characteristics and does not allow cross-searching. We then used the terms "special education" and "inclusive education", which generated a high result of documents for each descriptor (3,035 and 1,381, respectively), totaling 4,416. This database does not display the abstract of all materials directly on the portal; thus, in the first stage, we read the available ones and accessed the other texts in full and eliminated those that were not directly related to the subject and were repeated, which resulted to 47 documents for the descriptor "special education" and 22 for "inclusive education". Then, all selected documents were fully accessed for the second selection stage and only two were selected because they met the research objective.

Finally, a more thorough reading was carried out in order to verify the content of the 25 products found, based on the objectives, method and results. In this phase, each text was read integrally to identify the main ideas and their synthesis, making it possible to describe the scientific production in the area of Special Education on the educational assistance to the age group from zero to three years, initial phase of Early Childhood Education in the last 25 years .

3 Results

Figure 1 shows the frequency of products found, by year and type. In relation to the year, we observed that there is no production on Special or Inclusive Education in daycare between 1993 and 2002, as well as in from 2007 to 2011. The distribution is irregular for the period.

Source: Elaborated by the authors, based on the data obtained after search in database.

Figure 1 Frequency of documents according to type and year 

Some facts can be considered to help in understanding these results. The daycare facilities were only included as part of the educational system with the LDB 9,394/1996, with municipalities having 10 years to do so; thus, this period ended in 2006. We can imagine that, prior to that date, assistance to this age group was not the focus of educational studies because it did not raise questions for scholars in the area. In addition, as already mentioned, Special Education had an important milestone in 2008, with the publication of the National Policy on Special Education in the Perspective of Inclusive Education, although, before that, it should have already been considered in the Early Childhood phase, due to its transversality. From that year (2008), it is possible to verify an increase in the number of productions on the subject.

Among the types of products, we verified that five doctoral dissertations were developed in different graduate programs: Psychology (2), Special Education (1), Education (1) and Child and Adolescent Health (1). As for the 12 master's theses, the majority (7) was defended in Graduate programs in Education in different regions of Brazil, followed by Special Education (3), Psychology (1) and Planning and Analysis of Public Policies (1).

The total number of papers was eight, published in different journals, among them Revista de Educação Especial de Santa Maria (2), Ciências e Cognição, Revista Brasileira de Educação Especial, Temas em Psicologia, Psicologia em Estudo, Policy Analysis Archives and Cadernos de Pesquisa, all with one publication. Upon verification of the difference between the researches in the Graduate programs (17) and the publications in journals (8), we can assume that the dissemination of the results of these studies still falls short of the desired one. We verified that a paper (^{Vitta, 2010}) clearly presented the results of one of the doctoral dissertations (defended in 2004). We opted to disregard the paper in order to avoid a duplication of results.

4 How do researchers collaborate with special education in Daycare?

One problem that can be observed in the provision of education to the child from zero to three years old runs through the understanding that he/she has this right and that the State and the family have a duty to offer him/her, regardless of his/her specific needs. For this, public policies must contemplate this phase of education, recognizing their specificities. From the readings we have made, we conclude that there is a need for a more detailed and accurate look at the different Brazilian realities. Difficulties with physical, material and personnel resources are aspects that directly interfere with the routine and that appeared in the researches that uncovered the daily routine of these institutions, being recurrent themes in the speeches of professionals who assist the children in daycare. However, it is not enough to identify these problems, it is necessary to find ways to solve them through successful experiences, showing the aspects that promote the quality of the educational service.

This understanding is directly related to the education that the professional receives, since, assuming that the child can benefit from education in daycare, the education can meet the different demands of children, ensuring that this right is respected in line with the improvement of the quality of life in the age group. ^{Rodrigues and Lima-Rodrigues (2011, p. 58)} emphasized the need for teaching degree courses "developed under inclusive values to educate Inclusive Education teachers" as "a valuable and decisive factor promoting equity and participation of all students".

From the reading of these studies, we identified the desire for multiprofessional support for inclusion in daycare. ^{López (2010)} highlights the need for Specialized Educational Service (SES) and how it would interfere in the routine of the proposed activities so that the child in the age group in focus would receive better education conditions. In this sense, we ask ourselves about the adequacy of the SES to attend daycare since its inception, that is, children from four months of age. Would these professionals have sufficient knowledge to evaluate the child's developmental problems in this age group? Or, would this kind of care lead to greater labeling of children with difficulties in the social environment of the daycare? These are issues that need to be investigated. An imminent danger of SES professionals not adequately prepared in daycare is the labeling of children as having special educational needs that may be directly related to the lack of stimuli caused by a materially and culturally impoverished family environment, or even to the difficulty of the daycare in dealing with characteristic developmental differences of the age group. Considering that this is an environment where children have a greater chance of interacting with people, objects and spaces, it would be at least desirable to know about human development, as well as to understand the diverse factors that interfere in the relation between daycare vs children vs child development, enabling studies and offering meaningful activities for them (^{Vitta, 2004}).

This study presents some limitations, such as the restriction to texts on Special Education and daycare facilities in Brazil, limiting the breadth of results to our reality, but broadening the discussion of the topic in question. Another problem refers specifically to the subject treated, because it is possible that texts about daycare do not use this word as a descriptor and, consequently, not appeared in the searches performed. We also emphasize that a study of documents on a scientific basis, such as this one, does not cover practices that may be occurring in different Brazilian municipalities. As we have seen, there are reports of some experiences aimed at inclusion in daycare, but still a few, considering the size of the national territory and the diversity that it covers.

Daycare is not the stage of education of major interest among researchers, nor in official documents, but it gradually draws attention to its specific potentialities and specific problems. The issue of inclusion in this educational phase also presents different fronts to be studied. Investigating the education of the professionals for the daycare, both initial and continuing, the school routine and the difficulties of this routine, can help in the improvement of the offer of quality education for this part of the population.