MIDIATIZAÇÃO E DIVULGAÇÃO CIENTÍFICA EM UMA HORTA ESCOLAR: É POSSÍVEL TRABALHAR COM HORTAS SEM TER UMA HORTA?

Mediatization and scientific communication in a school vegetable garden: is it possible to work with gardens without owning one?

Abstract

The Horta Escolar project aims to contribute to science education, based on the teaching of content related to different areas of knowledge; of research and extension, promoting actions that involve our school community and the followers of our social media. The School Garden was created to function as a “living laboratory” contextualizing, through practice, activities related to Biology Teaching, Food and Nutrition Education and Teaching through Technologies. However, the social isolation imposed by the COVID 19 pandemic led us to the unusual challenge of working with a school garden without full access to our planted space for carrying out our activities for about two years. In this context, we improved our social media, aiming at scientific dissemination and the popularization of science through our posts. We work with some fundamental concepts that guide our activities in the media. They are the concepts of botanical blindness, unconventional food plants, scientific dissemination and addressing. All our posts are prepared by the students in a participatory way, under the guidance of the project coordination. For the production of @hortacefet profile posts, their authors consider data referring to profile metrics and the interaction of followers in previous posts. Currently our profile has 14 post categories. Our main post, which happens more frequently, is the plant carousel, which contains basic information about the plant, its forms of cultivation, aspects and nutritional properties; recipe and references. The virtualization of work made it possible to maintain relationships with our students and partners and enabled us to significantly increase the number of followers on our profile. We can say that Instagram has become an important tool for disseminating knowledge and linking with the participating public.