Centro de ciências sob o olhar de professores: leituras possíveis em visitas escolares ao Centro de Ciências da UFJF

Abstract

The present work aims to present an investigation in the science education area, precisely concerning museums and science centers, and their relation with the school. The mentioned spaces can communicate with the public through expositions, objects and the realization of activities, which are observed to have not only one, already posed, meaning, i.e., a meaning to be interpreted by the visitor, but are open to the possibility of producing different meanings according to the visitor’s reading history and conditions of production. Faced with these facts, this work’s methodological and theoretical basis is the French Speech Analysis, of which will be used the reading concepts, speech production conditions, speech formation, and inter-speech. Through a revision of the literature, we search for an articulation between the museum or science center concerning the visitation and the school, by investigating its inter-relations. Our proposition is to get to know the speech production conditions of the Junior School Science teachers about museums and science centers, alongside with the attempt to identify their readings on visitations with the students to the UFJF’s Science Center. Concerning our methodological point of view, we applied a pre-visitation survey to four teachers and after the visitation we realized semi structured and audio-recorded interviews, which were later transcript. The analysis was made considering the theoretical, empirical and referential corpus. Broadly speaking, it was possible to establish that the teachers who were part of the research aim mainly to find a complementary element to what is approached in classrooms; what was also noted was that there are many dilemmas for the visitation to take place, e. g., transportation defrayal. Awaken the students’ interest, sharpen their curiosity, provoke their physical, psychological and intellectual engagement – these are some of the objectives behind the existence of the Science Center, and they were also mentioned in the teachers’ readings, while acknowledging the importance of motivation in learning. The teachers do not visit the place before taking their students, even when going to a new exhibition. Talking is what mostly guides the relationship between teachers and students before and after the visitation – being a way to prepare or wrap up their experience. This study was highly important to map these readings, which revealed to be paraphrastic readings, and point to the need of thinking actions which are able to promote a dialogue between the two institutions as a way to produce more polissemic meanings.