Abstract
This study aims to analyze the different perceptions of school Physics expressed in essays written by high school seniors. The data includes two types of written production. In the first type, students wrote about Newton's Laws outside of the context of the school's syllabus. In the second, the theme was the relationship between the students and Physics as a school subject. Understanding that the essays in question were written under a specific context, socio-cultural referential and the bakhtinian theory of language were used to direct the analysis. The results indicate the overly negative position of the students in relation to school Physics, as well as their perception of this science as naïve and idealized. However, the study suggests the use of discursive strategies as a promising example of the inversion of student's negative positioning toward Physics. As a conclusion, the study offers a reflection on the objectives presented to scientific literacy.
Keywords
language; teaching of Physics; socio-cultural background