Brazilian Sign Language and The Bilingual Teaching of Astronomy
Astronomy, Sign Language, Scientific Visual Literacy.
Along history, the education of Deaf people has been through some variations and currently, the strategy that is observed as the most efficient for this is bilingual education, since it prioritizes Libras as the native language of this public. Therefore, it is urgent that different areas of knowledge must reflect on how to adapt their teaching strategies to the Deaf community. There are some areas where there are already many deaf professionals working, either bringing new approaches to related contents, and rethinking or creating an appropriate vocabulary for the communication of their concepts, but it is not yet a reality for all areas, such as astronomy. Although there are some vocabularies associated with the concepts of this area, some terms need a greater reflection on their representation in Libras, so this research proposes this analysis both on the meanings of their terms and their possible signs in Libras to bring new proposals that allow a scientific visual literacy. Therefore, it was necessary to perform a survey of their meanings in Portuguese, as well as their signifiers in Libras, in order to later analyse them linguistically, both in an individual and in a relational way, to verify their coherence. With the previous results, it was already possible to perceive the lack of proper terms in Libras as well as an objective explanation, in the same language, about their meanings. With these results, new proposals for signs are being thought of and recorded for wide dissemination through some of the social media most used by the deaf community. We hope at the end of the research to contribute significantly, through the educational product, to the construction of a scientifically and linguistically suitable vocabulary, which assists the Deaf community in the appropriation of concepts as well as in communication on topics related to astronomy.