Nature of Science in the Analysis of News on Socially Acute Questions for Collective Activism

The severe deterioration of the planet by human action, social injustice and the rollback of democratic rights largely characterise today's world. Another characteristic is disinformation, which is directed at emotions and beliefs to make rational or reasonable explanations difficult. In this context, we are developing a training proposal on activism that starts from an initial problem statement related to a controversy about a socially acute question from which a process of enquiry is developed that includes: 1) analysis of the controversy through the cartography of controversy approach, 2) search, selection and analysis of information about the problem/controversy and 3) proposals for action in relation to the resolution of the stated problem and its implementation. In order to help citizens to understand science-related news better, identify and reject fake news and critically trust science, we focus in this paper on the first phase of the process of designing a news analysis tool based on a broad nature of science approach. This first phase consists of two stages: a) the review of the nature of science literature with the consequent selection of an initial set of 40 items from it and b) the selection and analysis of news on the socially acute question "the COVID-19 vaccine/vaccination". The result was the choice of 11 of the 40 items found in more than five news items (25%) for the construction of the tool.