Informação, mídia e ciência em aulas de Biologia: uma análise de eventos de letramento em uma turma do 1° ano do ensino médio

Abstract

The objective of this research is to analyze how high school students built, discursively, relationships between media, science and information in Biology lessons. Motivated by the increasing amount of misinformation related to science, several issues have been raised and facing contemporary science education, such as the use of different literacies – information, media, transmedia and scientific – in school context. Few studies focus on basic education, especially with regard to everyday life in the classroom. Our research is part of this context, developed through participant observation of Biology lessons of a high school class and guided by an ethnographic logic of research. Lessons were recorded in video, field notes and artifacts were collected, such as activities carried out by students and materials used in lessons. Data were analyzed from a macroscopic perspective through the construction of charts that allowed us a broad view of literacy events along the classroom trajectory, in order to select those with greater analytical potential. Through the identification of rich points, we selected three events to anchor our microscopic analyses. These anchor events were transcribed into message units and analyzed according to microethnography. The first results obtained guided our look towards other events in the class's daily life throughout the school year. These events were investigated through a contrastive analysis. Our results indicate that students evidenced the media as an agent that can refract and/or reflect what they consider as science. They identified situations in which the media refracted science, through different mechanisms: use of outdated data, extrapolation of conclusions, concealment and/or distortion of information with different motivations (e.g. economic, political). And, also, situations in which the media can act as an agent that reflects science: when it makes adequate use of scientific information, being able to stimulate behaviors aligned with science or act as a vehicle for scientific communication or a tool for checking information. Intertextual and intercontextual relations mobilized by the students also indicated the role of sources in the analysis of media, as well as information related to science. Throughout the events of the class history, students modified the way they analyzed such sources. Through teacher mediation, they began to develop more complex analyzes of the sources (who was the source, motivations related to the information, possible conflicts of interest) as a way of assessing the credibility of information, including those coming from science itself. Our study indicates the possibility of working with issues related to misinformation even in activities that do not specifically address this matter and promotion of confluences between different literacies. The relevance of teacher mediation in these discussions is also highlighted, as well as the protagonism of students in this type of activity. The results corroborate pedagogical proposals that aims at the “demonumentalization” of science in classroom and the construction of balanced trust in scientific information. Other studies, however, are needed in different contexts of basic education, especially those focusing on everyday classroom life.