“THIS IS THE FUNNIEST LESSON”: THE PRODUCTION FO POSITIVE EMOTIONS DURING ROLE PLAY IN THE MIDDLE YEARS SCIENCE CLASSROOM

Senka Henderson and Donna King 

Abstract

This study builds on our previous work where specific science activities, such as demonstrations and laboratory activities, evoked students’ positive emotional responses and focused students’ attention on the science content they were learning. In this study we were interested in students’ discrete emotions in a Year 8 science class expressed during a role-play activity in a biology unit on skin burns, called ‘Singed’. Data from two focus groups of students from the class are presented. Drawing on multiple data sources, including classroom video recordings, observations of classroom transactions, thinking prompts, field notes and emotion diaries completed at the end of each lesson, we developed insights into individual student emotions. Using a theoretical perspective drawn from theories of emotions founded in sociology, we identified that students expressed the emotions of happiness, joy, and enthusiasm during the role-play. These positive experiences aligned with a high interest score reported by students when the class results were averaged. Importantly, the thinking prompts which were questionnaires completed before and after the role-play, showed evidence of students’ learning and understanding of the science concepts related to skin burns. This study suggests that role-play can be used successfully as a teaching strategy in the middle years. 

Key Words

Role-play, Discrete emotions, Interest, Middle school science, Emotion diary

DRAMATIC & UNDRAMATIC EMOTIONAL ENERGY: CREATING AESTHETIC AND EMOTIVE LEARNING EXPERIENCES IN SCIENCE CLASSROOMS  

James P. Davis

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to illustrate how everyday mundane actions in science classrooms may be understood as everyday dramatic performances that are most often taken-for-granted and imbued with emotive experiences. To describe these experiences a novel sociological concept of emotional energy (EE) is adopted. EE is an individual and collective experience of togetherness, social cohesion or solidarity arising through embodied performances of situated social practices. It is a way for making visible, cognitive performances and emotive experiences by observing self-coordinating actions, bodily and conversational alignment, mutual bodily entrainment around physical objects, gravitation toward shared ideas, and the fluency of these interactions. In this chapter I make reference to a series of previous studies to describe emotional energy and the notion of everyday dramatic performances. I then describe strategies for educating preservice science teachers about emotional energy as an experience that may be generated and observed in science classrooms through planning and explicit teacher actions. Such awareness by science teachers is important for understanding the influence of emotional engagement in, and dramatic performances of, science learning.

Key Words

Dramatic, Emotion, Experience, Performance, Science

DOES BEING POSITIONED IN AN EXPERT SCIENTIST ROLE ENHANCE 11-13 YEAR OLD STUDENT PERCEPTIONS OF THEMSELVES AS SCIENTISTS? 

Carrie Swanson

Abstract

Student disengagement from school science and the rejection of science-based careers are well known issues. Active inquiry-based approaches are known to enhance learning and engagement in science. This chapter explores whether working in an expert scientist identity through the dramatic inquiry approach Mantle of the Expert (MOTE) supported the students’ self-identification of themselves as scientists. This chapter is based on a mixed method study exploring whether MOTE supported the development of twenty-seven 11-13-year-old students’ conceptual understandings about buoyancy and stability. Data was generated from assessments, classroom observations, teacher and student interviews and dramatic role conventions. Simple statistical and thematic analysis was undertaken with the findings interpreted through Figured Worlds.  Students worked in role as expert scientists re-investigating the sinking of the Ferry Wahine in Wellington Harbour in 1968. An expert scientist identity was explicitly planned and scaffolded. Students mirrored the work of scientists to examine data, conduct science experiments, defend their experimental conclusions and write a report. Student knowledge of the scientific concepts taught improved significantly and scientific terminology usage increased. However, it must be acknowledged that more students did not want to become a scientist but gained a greater awareness of science in society and science-based careers.

Key Words 

Drama, Identity, Figured Worlds, Mantle of the Expert, Science careers

STORIES FROM HISTORY: MORE AUTHENTIC WAYS OF THINKING THROUGH ACTING AND TALKING ABOUT SCIENCE 

Debra McGregor

Abstract

This chapter will discuss and demonstrate how it is possible to introduce young people to scientists’ life stories and draw on particular events or incidents that can inspire them to think more deeply about science. Noteworthy moments from historical scientific stories are dramatised in various ways to engage learners to consider these scientific happenings from different perspectives. The learning activities, adopted and adapted from established theatrical strategies, purposely oriented learners to think about the lives and work of scientists from varied viewpoints. Immersed and positioned differently in a range of historical contexts to work in-role enabled learners to consider science from alternate positions. This provided not only an historical dimension to learning about science, but many of the narratives the learners were introduced to offered insights about socio-cultural influences determining what and how scientists investigated in the past. Learners working in-role, in participatory ways, considering issues that faced scientists in the past, can inform and shape age-appropriate inquiry tasks. Drawn from a series of action research projects carried out in schools across the UK, ways that different theatrical strategies have been developed and trialled in classrooms to engage young people with stories form history are carefully described so that others might apply these approaches.

Key Words

Historical stories, Inquiry, Drama pedagogy, Participatory learning

AUSTRALIAN WOMEN IN SCIENCE: A MODEL FOR A RESEARCH-BASED THEATRE PROJECT IN SECONDARY SCHOOL CLASSROOMS

Richard Johnson Sallis and Jane Bird 

Abstract

This chapter reports on research conducted by the authors drawn from both primary and secondary data sources based on two theatre productions performed by students at the University of Melbourne. Both performances featured characters based on female alumni, and current students from a range of faculties were amongst the cast members. The researchers found that a common element of both productions was the emphasis on women in science and, developmental and performance processes akin to those used in research-based theatre. Research-based theatre is an increasingly popular form of research presentation in the social sciences. As the name suggests, it draws on research data and findings and shares them via performance. The authors argue that research-based theatre may provide a useful model for a factually-based ensemble (or group-devised) performance in senior secondary schools. The model they share is intended for use by teachers and their students in a range of secondary school learning areas, including Science and Humanities. The authors have developed their model based in part on their work with pre-service and in-service teachers who wish to embed drama pedagogies into their planning and teaching of non-drama subjects. When developing the model shared in this chapter, the authors also drew on their collective knowledge and experience in the areas of cross-curricular applications of drama and research-based theatre play-making processes.

Key Words

Research-based theatre, Women in science, Drama, Secondary schools

SCIENCE, DRAMA AND THE AESTHETIC

Russell Tytler and Vaughan Prain

Abstract

In this chapter we review the variety of themes opened up by the authors in this book and situate these themes within a semiotic aesthetic theoretical framing drawing on the work of the pragmatist semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce. We trace the historical divergence and interactions between art and science to argue that both disciplines create, reason about, and communicate knowledge and meaning through the inventive development and use of sign systems, infused with disciplinary aesthetics/values. We claim that this focus on meaning-making through sign systems allows us to see more clearly multiple opportunities for the symbiotic relationship between drama and science advocated by many chapter authors and by the editors in their Chapter 1 scene setting. 

Drawing on Peirce, we outline both (a) the interrelations between experiences of phenomena, sign systems and meaning-making and (b) the inevitable entwining of feeling and meaning in this process. We argue that a Peircean theoretical lens explains and warrants the value of drama’s embodied, narrative semiotic resources in supporting students’ construction of meaning in science classrooms, and their appreciation of dramatic forms in opening up meanings that have conceptual and human dimensions. We claim that this enrichment of focus and methods is a key to students developing a positive aesthetic sense of scientific ways of reasoning and acting in the world. Conversely, drama’s aesthetic perspective and semiotic resources are well placed to explore and interrogate themes, successes, and contemporary issues raised by science. 

Key Words

Science, Drama, Pragmatist semiotics, Aesthetics, Narrative, Meaning-making