Science fiction and the teaching of science: beyond the method of 'finding errors in movies'

Abstract

Works of science fiction have been pointed as an important resource in the teaching of science. However, more than a possible didactic resource to facilitate the learning of science, science fiction constitutes in itself a modality of discourse about science, insofar as it expresses through cinema and literature, interests and concerns about current scientific issues that impact directly on the socio-cultural sphere. It is, nevertheless, common to regard the possible didactic quality of fictional works only in terms of the supposed scientific correction of the concepts they present, an attitude that ignores the conditions of production of the fictional discourse. In the present work a methodology is proposed to analyze the content of works of science fiction in their relation to scientific knowledge, trying to reveal through elements of literary analysis and semiotics the process of construction of what we called counterfactual elements. The present analysis views the work of fiction not just as a simple didactic element, but as a discourse governed by fictional mechanisms, and that makes use of these mechanisms to convey positions, ideas and debates around current scientific themes. As a result, a categorization of these elements was developed based on the Greimasian semiotics, employing a set of distinctive features assumed as lexemes in the definition of the categories. By representing distinct narrative mechanisms, each one of these categories has the potential to be explored differently in didactic terms.