“Life is beautiful”: to read subtitles and to humanize yourself

Abstract

Learning acts of reading in school environments can result from the encounter of children with the plurality of genres of utterances, with various supports and media. Subtitled films offer children the conditions for them to learn to negotiate, in silence, the meanings of subtitles. This article reports a research and extension activity with the Italian film “La vita è bella” (“Life is beautiful”), developed with a small group of children, between 6 and 10 years old, in an non-government organization (NGO), in Marília, SP, supported by the principles of methodology in the human sciences developed by Bakhtin and in the concept of apperceptive mass by Jakubinskij. The dialogues between children and researchers, recorded and analyzed under the lens of this reference, show that children learn to quickly negotiate meanings; they are interested in debating tense issues such as oppression and violence against children and ethnic minorities and, for this reason, they are humanized; they also gradually become fond of films with good aesthetic quality.