Biotecnologia e cidadania: características e reelaboração discursiva dos textos informativos científicos

Abstract

The building of citizenship and the formation of collective citizens have become a major concern in the official documents of Science Education in Brazil. Singled out as an overriding principle nowadays and emphasized by the Science, Technology, and Society field (STS), this kind of approach requires, however, that scientific knowledge must be endowed with a closer examination of either the benefits or the social and environment implications involved. In order to analyze the discursive reworking of the scientific information texts in Science textbooks, this work has opted for Biotechnology as a major theme. In this sense, a documental study was carried out on three top books, all approved and nominated by the National Textbook Program (PNLD) in 2011. Aiming to shed light on these books characteristics in compositional, stylistic and thematic terms, we especially examine the discursive reworking process of all these aspects particularly as they are inserted into textbooks. With regard to the thematic content of them, the presence and/or absence of some STS approach substantiating the building of citizenship was identified. Through a comparative view, this study also found that, by means of a dialogic approach based on the idea of interlocution, the original scientific information texts seek to enable readers to think over and more closely keep up with the current progress in Biotechnology researches, while those inset texts are rekindled to the point of featuring driven, excerpted information which is supposed to be reliable but in most ways is only designed to be received without critique. It is clear, therefore, that original scientific information texts contribute to the building of citizenship much more relevantly than when they are rekindled to fit in the Science textbooks.