Entre presença e ausências: currículo e geografia na educação de jovens e adultos dos anos iniciais

Abstract

Youth and Adult Education (EJA) is a teaching modality marked by trajectories of school interruption, social inequalities, and a historical denial of the right to education. This study seeks to understand how the Geography curriculum has been discussed in academic literature within the context of this modality, especially in the early years of Elementary School, focusing on its presences, absences, and teaching approaches. Methodologically, this research is qualitative and bibliographic, structured through an analytical intersection between the fields of Curriculum, EJA, and Geographical Education. The analysis reveals that the historical precarization of this modality has caused a severe curricular impoverishment which, supported by the implicit forces of the hidden curriculum, restricts early schooling to a mechanical and merely instrumental literacy focused on labor survival. This highlights a scenario of regulatory invisibility resulting from the absence of specific national curricular guidelines for EJA within the National Common Curricular Base (Brasil, 2018), forcing the inadequate adaptation of parameters designed for children. Given this erasure, the urgency of School Geography is asserted as an inalienable formative right and a pathway to cultural belonging, capable of converting everyday geographical knowledge into authentic critical spatial reasoning. It is concluded that ensuring systematic access to this field of knowledge is a democratic prerequisite for curricular justice, providing the necessary theoretical lenses so that students can build themselves as historical, political, and rights-bearing subjects, capable of challenging urban spatial oppressions and acting as conscious authors of their own liberation and lived territory.