THE ROLE OF CINEMA INTO SCIENCE EDUCATION

Reforming science education – from educating educators, to developing standards, to improving access for all – is a worldwide challenge that is essential if overall improvements are to be made. In science education, it is more and more widely discovered that “horizontal teaching” – when teachers take students by the hand and lead them on a voyage of discovery, stimulating their observation and experimentation skills, imagination, curiosity and reasoning capacity - enhances students' intellectual and manual capacities enormously. This purpose discusses the role of cinema as a tool for the science education. The target was to explore the effect of using movies on the learning and retention of simple and integrated science knowledge. New educational approaches and methods that are inter- and transdisciplinary and issue-driven need adopting, and participatory practices and methods must be endorsed, to prepare young generations to live in a world of constant change. Based on the socio-interacionist approach by Vygotsky, it is acceptable that an audience can interact with the characters and share their emotions and actions showed in an audiovisual language. On this way we analyze some movies considering the potential of audiovisual, scientific and common languages to be used as a tool to mediating science teaching and learning. Furthermore, the audience can learn values, information and knowledge present into the movie discourse and thus, the cinema shows the science in a society. Moreover, audiovisual language may be important mediating variables that determine the effectiveness of cinema for enhancing science teaching and learning. If science and society want to get along they must learn to communicate more and better. No one says that it is easy, but it is the price today in a mature democratic society.