(300) CONTEXTUAL MODEL OF LEARNING IN SCIENCE MUSEUMS - AN EXPERIENCE IN PONTO UFMG ITINERANT MUSEUM

摘要

When performing an informal activity of Science communication, such as reading a book, visiting aScience fair or going to a museum, there are necessary and enough situations to share knowledge,information and, consequently, opportunities of teaching and learning. Considering those aspects,Science museums consolidate themselves as informal places of Science communication. In this set,it's urgently that the museums keep on transforming and updating constantly, due to the dynamism ofScience knowledge, so they can be more in tune with contemporary issues that provoke debatesinside the community where the visitor is inserted.Owing to its social role and its commitment with scientific knowledge, it's necessary to understand thestrategies those museums, especially Ponto UFMG Itinerant Museum, use, aiming to reach thelearning process mediated by scientific and cultural artifacts that compose the museum exhibit.According with Falk & Dierking (2000), the motivational and emotional cues are extremely relevant tothe construction of “new” knowledge. Under that perspective, this paper is oriented by two mainquestions: Which strategies stand out during the mediation between the visitors and the Ponto UFMGItinerant Museum exhibit? How can the personal intrinsic motivation influence the way each visitor willrelate with the objects and subjects covered in the museum space, therefore influencing the learning?In the hope of answering the central questions of this research, which can be considered a case-study(Yin, 2001), it was held an investigative work with 15 primary school students, with ages between 10and 12 years old, that presented learning disability. Several activities and scientific interventions wereperformed during the after class period, in the museum Ponto UFMG. It was adopted a perspectivethat enhanced the students/visitors personal contexts. It was analyzed, under the perspective ofcontextual learning model (Falk & Dierking, 2000), the emotional cues, the specific skills involved inthe interaction between the research participants and the scientific and cultural artifacts, the intrinsicmotivations that permeate the sociocultural space-time (the curiosity, the expectations) and the selfnotionover the learning process.