AUTHORS: TANIA LUCIA CORREA VALENTE UNIVERSIDADE TECNOLÓGICA FEDERAL DO PARANÁ

THE TEACHING AND LEARNING OF THE PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE AND NATURAL SCIENCES IN A SEMIOTIC APPROACH, FOR THE EDUCATION OF YOUTH AND ADULTS, WITH STUDENTS IN DEPRIVATION OF LIBERTY AUTHORS: TANIA LUCIA CORREA VALENTE UNIVERSIDADE TECNOLÓGICA FEDERAL DO PARANÁ MÁRIO SÉRGIO TEIXEIRA DE FREITAS UNIVERSIDADE TECNOLÓGICA FEDERAL DO PARANÁ

THE TEACHING AND LEARNING OF THE PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE AND NATURAL SCIENCES IN A SEMIOTIC APPROACH, FOR THE EDUCATION OF YOUTH AND ADULTS, WITH STUDENTS IN DEPRIVATION OF LIBERTY The experience of working with students of the Education of Youth and Adults program (Educação de Jovens e Adultos EJA, in Portuguese) who are in deprivation of liberty brings some concerns. How do we reach them, when many have never had any contact with the school? What contents would be of real significance within this context? What are the most suitable and permitted teaching resources within the prison environment? What strategies could be used to reduce disparities arising from different levels of schooling? How to reach the Scientific Literacy in this space? Trying to find some answers and some practical solutions to this daily work, we realized that the door to students, the most democratic, was not that of the written text, although the first goal of the Dr. Mário Faraco School is literacy. When we started the classes, we noticed that all the students avoided the written word, but they were defenseless to the reading of images. Then, this observation served as starting point for a reflection, which led us to the field of perception, to the field of reading signs, rather than to strict literacy. At the beginning of the process, the student is confronted with his illiteracy. Illiteracy is still a harsh reality for Brazil and has serious repercussions in the prison system, because it comes mainly from the poverty of our country. It represents the denial of fundamental rights such as lack of housing, food, employment, transportation, health and school. As a literacy teacher, with a first degree in Children Education, and as an Art teacher for initial series, we thought about the possibility of transposing the experience of reading images, carried out with children, to the group of EJA students. Our second degree in Chemistry, however, imposed the challenge of presenting Science contents also, providing some scientific literacy to the students. Faced with this challenge, we imagine that the study of art through the reading of images could serve as an intersection between the disciplines of Art, Sciences and Portuguese Language. From the application of Lúcia Santaella's studies, in the book Como eu ensino: leitura de imagens ( How I teach: reading images ) (SANTAELLA, 2012), we have realized how individuals are willing to read images. This task does not demand a formal

reading or writing ability; any person at any school level, even in the initial stages of literacy, is receptive and open to reading images, paintings, photos, prints, cartoons, etc. With this process, we intend to increase in the student the ability to read the surrounding world, the ability to re-signify the representation of the environment, and the ability to understand natural phenomena through initiation to the themes of science. During the process, we gradually present new words that enrich the student s vocabulary and empowers him with the written language, so that throughout and at the end of the process, the student will be able to read, write and produce small texts. We always start with a generative theme, and use diverse possibilities of readings within the universe of the arts, of science and of the diverse textual genres. Thus, we intended to lead the student to reflection, to the construction of ideas and to the organization of critical thinking, making knowledge meaningful. On the Semiotics and the Reading of a Work of Art Our experience has shown that the first cognitive gain in the classroom did not come directly from lectures, expository-dialogic classes, or the presentation of the alphabet, writing, and science. The first instance to which all are defenseless is the look. The ability to observe lived reality and interpret the signs culturally inserted in it is a human condition; there is nothing our eyes cannot grasp and our perception cannot read, unravel, and re-signify. We are beings of language and we understand the surrounding world as we devote ourselves to observing it. Exposing the student to the world as a phenomenon, and encouraging him to contemplate it, is the gateway to the student's cognitive process. We develop our pedagogical practice supported by the principles of Semiotics. Still a young science, Semiotics was thought by Charles Sanders Peirce (18391914). The name Semiotics comes from the Greek root semeion that means sign. Semiotics is the science of signs and deals with every language. In general, we are all able to realize that we have mastered one language (e.g. our mother tongue), but we may not immediately realize that we are capable of other languages; that we are able to produce, reproduce, modify, re-signify, transform the world around us, and that we do it by seeing, hearing and reading, establishing communication with one another. When we are interacting with someone, we not only use a language, but also a paraphernalia of languages that we are not able to define immediately. To be in the world, to perceive it: this only happens through an intricate and multiple network of languages and gradients of readings of forms, volumes, masses,

interaction of forces, movements, sounds, lines, etc.; we are also producers of sounds, gestures, expressions, graphic signs, lights etc. We make sense of the world around us through the look, the sound, the forms, the flavors. We are complex beings in the perception of phenomena and complex is the constitution of our subjectivity. We are symbolic beings; we apprehend meanings and signs and are ourselves signs, signifiers and meanings. Semiotics is a ternary project: sign, signifier and the interpreting component in the interpreter's mind, subject to multiple transformations in the face of social dynamics. For the American philosopher and chemist Charles Pierce, whose theory we use to support our study, phenomena appear to consciousness according to three categories, which are not mental analyzes, but modes as our thinking goes. Briefly, the categories of perception according to Peirce are named Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. We can understand the Firstness as the category of qualitative possibility, the sensible quality of things. The Secondness is the category of existence, the domain of the fact, and the Thirdness is the category of law, the domain of legislation. All three categories are present in our way of perceiving things. This explanation is necessary to understand the pedagogical practice this theory led us to, and to realize how it was instrumental in reaching and gaining the student in deprivation of liberty. From a work of art, for example, the image of a bread, a still life, by Salvador Dalí or Paul Cézanne, we can draw the attention of the student to these conditions of perception elaborated by Peirce. In a first reading, the student is invited to observe the work itself. Then the materials of which the painting is made, the colors, the tones, the technique, the use of paints, in short: the art of making a painting. Then, in a second stage we try to value the look of the agent, the painter, the choices he made, the light, the shadow, the dimensions, the arrangement of the objects in the painting, and we also present data about the author. After that, in a third moment, we discuss the interpretive gains of the image, the symbolism that appeared to the observer. Thus, after collecting the students perceptions, we can amplify the observed object and associate it with other languages, the language of science and the textual genres. Our intention is to reach other territories of knowledge through the reading of images, and to unveil other languages, such as the one of science.

Scientific Literacy Still in the same direction as Charles Sanders Peirce, Attico Chassot, a doctorate in Chemistry and Education at UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil), an illustrious professor and promoter of the concept of scientific literacy proposes, like Peirce, that science be understood primarily as a language: Science can be considered as a language constructed by men and women to explain our natural world. To understand this language (of science) as we understand something written in a language we know (for example, when one understands a written text in Portuguese) is to be able to understand the language in which nature is (being) written. It is also true that our difficulties with a text in a language we do not master can be compared with misunderstandings to explain many of the phenomena that occur in nature. For example, some readers of this text are likely to be able to distinguish whether a page in a book or magazine is written in Swedish or in Norwegian, as well as there may be Nordics who may not recognize the difference between a text in Portuguese and one in Spanish. This is the analogy I seek when I see science as a language (CHASSOT, 2003 p.91). From this analogy, and from reading Chassot s work, we find that he considers the process of learning science as the appropriation of a language. To literate an individual scientifically is a task that relates to the understanding of the surrounding world, physical, lived in the form of a language to be understood. Peirce even considers as part of his theory about the signs, the reading of the climate. That is, the perceived, phenomenological world is the world that matters to education. This territory of Semiotics is the place where we anchor our practice, although within a concrete space (the prison) that is an invitation to the dullness of perception. From the observation of images, it is possible to transpose the signs contained in them into the exchangeable signs of science. From the image of a bread to the making of a loaf of bread, we intend to approach the very principles of science teaching: cause and effect, measures, quantities, reactions and alterations of matter, changes of physical states, effects of heat, etc. When we think of scientific literacy in prisons, we desire the student may be able to understand basic terms of science and fundamental scientific concepts, so that he can understand basic information and realize everyday situations. We hope that the student can understand the nature of science and the ethical and political factors associated with it, leading him/her to make reflections and analyzes of daily problems that involve scientific concepts or knowledge arising from them. It is also our desire that the student understands the relationships between science, technology, society and the environment and their importance for a healthy and sustainable planet.

On the Literacy Process According to Paulo Freire (1995), the literacy process is characterized by a political project that should guarantee the right of each student to affirm his or her own voice, since, according to the author, literacy is not a play on words; it is the reflexive awareness of culture, the critical reconstruction of the human world, the opening of new paths (...). Literacy, therefore, is the whole pedagogy: learning to read is to learn to speak its own word. (p.14). In this sense, the process of literacy in the critical perspective can only be mediated by a critical teacher-citizen, that is, by someone acting inside and outside the school as a critical citizen. Therefore, by a teacher who recognizes education as a political process and defends, as an educational goal, the emancipation of man. Literacy is a creative act in which the illiterate critically grasps the need to learn to read and write, preparing to be the agent of this learning. And he/she manages to do so insofar as literacy is more than the mere mechanical mastery of writing and reading techniques. Literacy involves understanding what is read and written. It is to communicate graphically, consisting not in a mechanical memorization of sentences, words, syllables, unrelated to an existential universe, but in an attitude of creation and recreation. Freire's teachings help us understand that literacy is about apprehending and seizing a code, which empowers the student. Thinking this way, we understand that the educator must keep in mind that dealing with language is to lead the student to understand himself as subject, which makes certain statements, under certain social-historical conditions. Moreover, that in his enunciation, he/she does it with a certain function and that, to do it, he/she conveys his/her ideas under a certain textual genre. In view of this, the pedagogical practices have to make the use of different texts circulating in society, to incite the student s reflection and to propitiate his/her mastery of reading and writing abilities. Literature, scientific texts, informative texts, recipes, poetry, newspaper news, etc., are part of this approximation of the subject with the written products of his/her culture. Thus, Semiotics provides the basis for the use of various languages, such as the artistic (through works of art), the scientific (through experiments that uncover natural phenomena) and writing (through various textual genres), with the purpose of achieving literacy of the convicted.

References CHASSOT, Attico. Alfabetização Científica - Questões e Desafios para a Educação. Ijuí: Editora da Unijuí, 2000. FREIRE, Paulo. Política e educação. São Paulo: Cortez, 1995. SANTAELLA, Lúcia. O que é semiótica (Coleção Primeiros Passos). São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1988. SANTAELLA, Lúcia. Como eu ensino: leitura de imagens. São Paulo: Melhoramentos, 2012.