Gulliver in Laputa: didactic transposition and STS in the dialogue between literature and teaching - rationality, reasonability and interdisciplinarity

Resumo

This paper brings reflections concerning the dialogue between literary creation and teaching, considered not only often possible, but also usually interdisciplinary and full of potential to broaden students’ views about subjects taught. Our considerations will be directed to the work of Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, specifically its third part, in which the protagonist visits Laputa, an island that illustrates the paradox of having reached very high scientifical knowledge combined with no kinds of benefits to its population. This work aims at presenting some of the possibilities of using this excerpt of Swift’s book to explore social and political implications that may be useful for motivating reflection while teaching. In order to do this, we base our notes on the Didactic Transposition (DT) and on the concept of Science, Technology and Society (STS), also resorting to the concepts of rationality, reasonability and interdisciplinarity. In addition to the pedagogical mediation by the teacher, we aim to discuss that literary excerpts bring possibilities for different and alternative teaching strategies that have dialogue and interdisciplinarity as their core.