Scientific tales and projects: An ethnographic investigation

Abstract

This paper is the report of an ethnographic research conducted in a classroom, where scientific projects were taught using fantastic stories such as those of Poe or Lu Sin; the didactic method or procedure was that of linguistic education. We worked with nine students from the Agroindustrial Engineering course who were conducting research and needed to prepare reports. It was hypothesized that using didactic statistics in preparing students to activate a mental process with stories helps them to understand a research project or report more easily. The results were good: they were measured with students' expositions in which they used other stories, with tests, with writings, and all this was evaluated with tables provided by linguistic education; in some students' actions (single or emotional actions) they showed a certain disdain for artistic activities, in others, an enormous appreciation. This led the author to raise again the art-science dichotomy, and she concluded with Nietzsche that this game, through the literature proposed in this class, is an attempt by the teacher to recover the natural relationship with knowledge.