Do princesses fart? Recontextualizing sciences and storytelling in children’s perceptions

Abstract

Children reflect at school from children’s stories that deal with sensitive and complex topics over gender issues, mainly in the daily lives questioning male and female behavior. Princesses are characters that appear in a scenario of feminine designations represented in fairy tales, reproducing behaviors that point to a female attitude performance. The objective of this research was to investigate children’s different perceptions toward the main topic of the story, observing the children’s understanding in relation to gender and daily life from their personal perceptions. Thus, we present the concept of literaturalization of science, a term which is studied by the COTEDIC UNILASALLE/CNPq research group, that articulates the study of science areas with literature from the story Even Princesses Fart (literal translation from Portuguese, “Até as princesas soltam pum”) dialoguing with Palma (2009), Backes, Chitolina, and Sciascia (2019), Reis e Backes (2022) to discuss the literaturalization of sciences; to deal with the research of/in/with everyday life we were inspired by Alves (2001); in order to dialogue about the processes of interaction we used Maturana and Varela (2021); and for the gender meaning we used Louro (2007), Fischer (2002), and Sabat (2001). The research was carried out with four classes in the first grade of elementary education at a public school in the municipality of Canoas/RS. Through the exploratory qualitative research, we analyzed the students' speeches and graphic records, which were submitted for interpretive analysis, articulating theoretical references and producing data. We observed that complex science themes, which strain scientific knowledge and common sense, contribute to children's sensitivity in relation to the meanings discussed about gender when recontextualized to storytelling.