Decolonialidade e divulgação científica: entre teoria e prática em um projeto de extensão com crianças

Abstract

Children's University (UC) is a term that has been used to designate a possible format for outreach projects with children, and has become prominent during the last decade, when a large number of universities worldwide have started, engagement programs for children aged 4 to 14 years. The scientific dissemination project entitled University of Children of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UC-UFMG), has a history of more than 13 years of work and research in the area of scientific dissemination to / with children. With a highly diversified team, the project has had the collaboration of professors from different areas of knowledge, graduate and undergraduate students from different courses, mainly in Social Communication, Fine Arts and Medicine. The methodology used by the project is its own and was built throughout its years of existence and is based on Freire's pedagogy and on the theory of “free choice learning”, which enable the construction of knowledge according to the reality of each child and of each participating adult, who brings their interests and experiences with them. Within the scope of the UC-UFMG, questions and inquiries that children present to us guide all practices, including workshops, production of animation shorts, radio programs and books. If initially the UCs approach was quite traditional, with regard to communication, important reflections on the perception of childhood and children have subsidized changes in practices with this audience and pointed to other possibilities for dialogue. From a less adult-centered approach, this research aimed to carry out analyzes of the relationships that take place in the workshops with children, and having as theoretical support decolonial studies and the sociology of childhood, raising possibilities for reflections that may contribute to the field of Scientific Dissemination, mainly with children. The methodological devices used for data collection were participant observation from the perspective of action research, through recording in a field diary with subsequent expansion of notes and also records in videos, photos and drawings. The workshops were planned based on spontaneous questions from children about the human body theme, which were previously collected. We conducted a total of 16 workshops, with 2 groups of children of different ages, a group aged 5 to 6 years, and other groups aged 9 to 12 years, the group of mediators, had 5 undergraduate students, 3 graduate students, and the project coordinator, the workshops were held in schools and at the Education and Communication Center in Life Sciences (NEDUCOM), the period for conducting the studies was in the 1st semester of 2016 and the 2nd semester of 2017. From a floating “reading” of the videos, some conditions of decoloniality were identified, namely: visibility of diversities; respect for singularities; appreciation of the child's history and / or culture; practices and speeches of resistance and conflicts. And through the researcher's interpretation, we analyzed the words or expressions that translated, the interactions, forces, feelings and emotions of the participants. According to previous guidelines given to mediators, children should be free to move around the environment, to use time and to select and handle objects. From the analysis of documentary videos of meetings with the children, we observe that they resist by various means, which do not necessarily pass through oral language, but by other means such as bodily movements, transgressions in the way of using space, time and objects. It started from the understanding of resistance as epistemic disobedience and / or transgression of the knowledge construction process. According to decolonial studies, resisting implies not only struggles, but also the construction and creation of something new, a change in paradigm, patterns, resisting everything that can be oppressive. From resistance movements, children give visibility to their bodies, knowledge and subjectivities, which are obscured by adult-centeredness in school environments and oppressors. Mediators sought to avoid interventions that could restrict freedom of choice or that could put the child in invisibility and / or passivity, characterizing a process of heteronomy. If, on the one hand, the mediator tended to respect the children's choices most of the time, on the other hand, he / she did not fail to mark his space, to establish “agreed upon” and to take care that each child also respected the desire of “the other”. From the analysis of these results, reflections on scientific dissemination with children emerged, with potential relevance in guiding practices permeated by autonomy and freedom of choice, and in this study also, examples of resistance, autonomy, transdisciplinarity in the context of the UC-UFMG extension project will be presented and discussed in the light of decolonial studies.