Social Communication students' perception of the sciences/letters dichotomy as a reflecting framework to promote the dissemination of sciences

Abstract

Nowadays, science journalism shares its role with other message transmitters. Moreover, it is a minority professional option. To find out the origin of this situation, we start from the proposal that Spanish universities train in a dichotomous academic structure, Science/Letters. In this academic structure, students in one branch of knowledge receive little training on the knowledge of the others. We analyze whether this academic organization influences the perception that Social Communication students have of the experimental sciences, nature, health, humanities and social sciences. To verify it, we surveyed journalism and audiovisual communication students. We used a printed questionnaire structured in open, dichotomous and scale questions. Then we applied descriptive statistics to the obtained data, which allowed us to verify that future journalists not only entered the undergraduate studies considering themselves Letters students, but they went through it without modifying that self-perception. One conclusion is that it is urgent to rethink the prevailing training to open it towards an integrative inter and transdisciplinary pedagogical conception, and to improve the presence of sciences on the news agenda.