Non-formal education and written mediations

Popular science and non-formal education allow the study of knowledge diffusion outside the school context. Written mediations in this context are considered a reformulation of specialized discourse. This is an attempt to spread knowledge outside specialist circles. This mediation discourse takes place between the specialist and the non-specialist. We have analyzed a body of written mediations to see if the writer must make choices, alter, modify, restructure and reformulate in order to make the information accessible. More specifically, we analysed the mediations based on the thirteen distorting trends proposed by Berman (1999) : rationalisation, clarification, expansion, ennoblement, qualitative impoverishment, quantitative impoverishment, homogenisation, the destruction of rhythms, the destruction of underlying networks of signification, the destruction of linguistic patternings, the destruction of vernacular networks or their exoticisation, the destruction of expressions and idioms and the effacement of the superimposition of languages. We consider that written mediations as extensions of education are at the heart of the tension between appreciation through cultural criteria and appreciation through market criteria.