Case Study 4

This case study is based on data from an action research developed at two public preschools in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, in the years 2011/2012. ¹ This chapter describes how the focus of the research had to be changed, evolving from a more ambitious initial question based on how children participate in their own assessment to more simple ones, as the reality of the two schools became more concrete. Some of these later questions were about how to change teachers’ practices at the classroom level, in order to make it possible for children to be heard and how to make their voices visible in the assessment reports. In this process, successive layers of these routine practices, and of what they meant for teachers, had to be explored and transformed.