Educational practices aimed at scientific literacy

mapping the use of scientific journalism as teaching material in a communitarian university in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Abstract

This article was driven by the following question: What is the potential for using journalistic stories on Science, Technology, and Innovation (namely, scientific journalism), as part of school education, as complementary teaching material? Therefore, its main goal was to contribute to the understanding of the process of scientific literacy when it comes to the intersection of different languages ​​(scientific, journalistic, didactic) that takes place in educational practices. This is an exploratory quantitative-descriptive study; the literature review explored the concept of scientific literacy and the possible relations with the occurrence of scientific denialism, followed by a survey that mapped how scientific journalism has been used as teaching material, by professors in all fields of knowledge, in a communitarian university located in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Through this survey, it was possible to prove that there is a significant potential for the use of scientific journalism as teaching material: more than 96% of the surveyed professors agreed that scientific journalism can be used as teaching material, and 70.3% declared that they have already used this kind of texts in class at some point. The main finding of this study was the fact that journalistic texts occupied the third position as the complementary teaching materials that are most used in class, even ahead of other kind of materials considered more “traditional.”