Abstract:

During the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, fake news, posing as scientific, emerged as a devastating new plague around the world. False information of this kind has an enormous repercussion and could have possibly contributed to the high number of COVID-19 deaths around the world, especially in Brazil. Given the low percentage of people without a high school diploma, even less with complete formal education, false information disseminates and is believed faster and more easily by a big part of the country’s population. Moreover, recent political developments have been enforcing an anti-scientific position. Considering a Teacher Training Course on Biological Sciences at the Federal Institute of Amazonas (Brazil), the difficulty to understand and write texts in a proper academic language among advanced undergraduate students, and the need to remedy scientific literacy and better prepare our students, we decided to teach them how to write scientific information for the general public. This idea was encouraged, in part, by the tempest number of live streams produced and consumed since the beginning of this pandemic, and because our students were also engaged in different projects of this kind, in private or for academic purposes. Our contribution aimed at offering a complementary course for future educators on scientific communication for the public. The course was planned for twenty hours, divided into five online sessions of two hours using Google® Meet and five tasks to be accomplished between the sessions (ten hours) mediated by Google® Classroom. The background for the course material is a set of scientific publications in Portuguese that helped us establish specific parameters to be followed aiming at well-constructed texts. These parameters helped to identify specific parts of a scientific publication that represent key aspects for the comprehension of the main ideas, objectives, methods, results, and conclusions of the studies. Based on them, the students should be able to gather this information and practice their writing, thus improving their skills of reading and comprehension of academic texts and putting their ideas together in a new simplified format for the public. Short-term results will be the publication of an e-book with the texts written by the participants. In the long term, we expect to improve the quality of texts and teaching material of future teachers.

Keywords:

Teacher training, academic literacy, scientific dissemination.