Science to kids and kids to science: a comparative analysis of discourses of scientific popularization for children

Abstract

This project aims at understanding the place held by children relatively to one of the fundamental aspects of contemporary society: science as a behavior influencer and source of explanation about facts. In order to do this, we will use scientific popularization utterances directed to children and belonging to different languages/cultures, namely, the cover articles of some issues of the Brazilian magazine Ciência Hoje das Crianças and the British magazine Aquila. We will utilize the comparative method of discourse analysis, with the objective of reaching the cultures underlying these utterances, identifying the similarities and differences between them and their causes. The ideas of the members of the Bakhtin Circle will be on the basis of the project, since they bring forward a socio-interactive vision of language, which allows us to establish a connection between the verbal portion of the texts, the situation in which they are inserted and the involved participants, highlighting not only the producer, who has a certain vision about the little ones and the process of scientific popularization for them, but also the presumed addressee: the children, who play an active and important part in the "building" of the utterances. After we establish the adequate theoretical and methodological tools, the gathered data will be analysed and compared in order to answer the following research question: How are children conceived by the utterances of the magazines Ciência Hoje das Crianças and Aquila and how do they influence these utterances? (AU)