Comics and media education: the media education′sworkshop experience with 4 th grade children from a school in Cambé-PR Histórias em quadrinhos e midiaeduca o: a experiência de oficinas midiaeducativas sobre HQ com alunos da 4a série de uma escola de Cambé-PR

The media’s mighty presence in current society has raised a series of debates and questions about its relationship with children. One of the possible biases of reflection and action consists in mediaeducation, an interdisciplinary field that emerges among the areas of Communication and Education, whose purpose is contribute to the reflective consumption and production of a social response to the media in various educational spaces, both formal and nonformal. Within this context of mediaeducative praxis, the present study aims to conduct mediaeducation workshops on comic books with a group of nine students in a 4th grade class (5th year) of basic education in Olavo Soares Barros public school, in Cambé – PR, as well as analyze how they can assist in critical and creative formation of participating subjects. The choice of this means of communication is based on prior notice of the interest that students of the educational institution had about this vehicle. The research methodology, which led to the scientific, aligns with the participatory research assumptions such as researcher’s integration and interaction in the studied reality, the transformation of the object of study in the subject, the researcher’s role of observer and the return of knowledge to the subjects and studied contexts. The methodological path employed in conducted workshops and its analysis is presented as a set of techniques and approaches that comprise the initial survey with the class, the interviews, the participant observation and activities direction in the mediaeducation productive context and its progressive methodology. The workshops implementation took place between the months of May and July of 2011, a total of 15 meetings, and was structured in four complementary and sometimes simultaneous steps: students’ literacy in comic books language, connotative reading of plots and characters, critical reading of the content and the production of comic books by participants. The theoretical reference that supports the discussions and practices includes the contribution of researchers from mediaeducation, of comic books and their relationship to the educational processes. The workshops analysis is based on the articulation between the conceptual aspects of mediaeducation, the data observed during the research and evaluation of participants, parents and teachers. The considerations undertaken point to the need of understanding the mediaeducative praxis as a space for mediation, the articulation between the participants’ production of meaning and their critical reading, the enhancement of