(1108)TEACHING SCIENCE TO THE DEAF - A BRAZILIAN EXPERIENCE

摘要

Teaching science goes beyond the idea of forming future research scientists, but derives from theneed to form future citizens capable of understanding the implications of the major changes broughtabout by technological advances, and, in parallel, to appreciate the social value of scientificknowledge. However, the isolation experienced by the deaf community, produced by thelanguage/communication barrier, has impeded this group from acquiring general information normallyobtained not only via school education, but also in an informal fashion. This is particularly manifestedin regard to scientific knowledge.Since 2002, Brazil has established by decree that Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS) should beaccepted as the official language of the Brazilian deaf community and used for educational purposes.Brazilian deaf face difficulties in developing the capacity of reading and writing in the native languageof their country, attaining a very low level of literacy.When trying to establish the level of information obtained by Brazilian deaf youths through the media,it became clear that despite the fact that deaf youngsters claim that most of their information derivesfrom reading newspapers, their level of comprehension of what they read is very superficial. Similarly,science learned at school lacks real undestanding. LIBRAS is defficient in scientific terms, making itdifficult to teach scientific concepts in sign language, and most students lack real-world experience ofwhat is being taught. Another complicating issue in science teaching for the deaf is the lack ofspecialization found among interpreters of sign language, most of them do not know enough scienceto be able to overcome the lack of scientific terms in LIBRAS.The present work describes our experience with more than 170 profoundly deaf school students, thathave LIBRAS as their first language. We verified if their kowledge and interest in life sciences could beimproved by the intervention of various activities of our group. Among them were short courses givenin sign language, based on a specific scientific topic, without theoretical classes and involving inquiry,hands-on, minds-on and collaborative work. In a similar style, but covering all areas of biosciences ina sequential fashion, we offered a one year course to a limited number of deaf students. As a result ofthe need to communicate with each other, deaf students started to develop new signs to representscientific-technological terms. These new signs were recorded, tested with other deaf students and puttoghether in the form of a scientific sign language glossary. To overcome the lack of specialization ofthe LIBRAS interpreter, we created a course for specializing these professionals. To minimize theproblem of defficient information transmission, we conducted a debate surrounding the issue on howmuch the media was aware of the lack of efficiency of information transmission for the deaf. The deafcommunity has been ignored by the mass media that never considered that this group has a problemin receiving information. Finally, in an attempt to contextualize some of the scientific information aswell as adding general culture to this group of deaf students, we created a series of comic booksjoining history, science and entertainment.This set of actions motivated deaf students towards science and increased their understanding of theimportance of science.