Our results indicate that the teachers use the curriculum materials more or less as intended by ENGAGE, but with minor adaptions, such as adding or removing scientific content, activities or supporting structures. These adaptions are motivated by the main aim of the teacher, for example learning science, training skills or becoming more responsible citizens, and can greatly change the impact of the lesson on the students. In addition, the teachers adapt the lesson to the class or to special groups of students.
Some of our results may indicate that teachers in the lower grades tend to focus more on inquiry skills and the socioscientific issues in the materials, thereby voicing Roberts’ Vision II, while teachers of older students tend to focus more on scientific facts, voicing Roberts’
Vision I (Roberts 2007). On the other hand, it is apparent that the individual teacher’s
practical knowledge strongly affects the teacher’s use of the ENGAGE material (van Driel et al., 2001).
After the lesson, many teachers suggest additional changes and several teachers realized that their role as teacher was more important than they thought; they should have had stronger class management, better instructions and follow-up. Interestingly, although most of the teachers reflect well upon the use of the material in their class beforehand, they seem to use their PCK much more actively in their reflections, especially regarding adaptions and class management after the lessons. Similar results were seen in a larger study on the impact of using one, single-lesson ENGAGE curriculum material on the teachers’ PCK in four countries (Bayram-Jacobs et al, 2017), that included data from 6 of the teachers in the current study.
This could indicate that the teacher’s personal experience of how the material works in the classroom, and then sharing these reflections, contributes to developing the teachers’ PCK, practical knowledge and reflection (van Driel et al., 2001; Beyer & Davis, 2012).
So…What can we learn from this?
Our results suggest that the following factors can make curriculum materials more useful for the teachers:
• Curriculum-relevant, up-to-date topics, aimed at students. Can be an alternative to old fashioned or outdated school books
• Simple but thorough teacher guide
• Short time span for preparation and lesson
• Multiple short and varied activities – easy to add, remove or change
• Easy to adapt to level or diversity of the class
• Supporting structures that can be removed for advanced students
• Group tasks that include several different types of skills, so that the students can use their different kinds of strengths in the work (theoretical, practical, technical, artistic, creative, logical, systematic etc)
• Alternative student outputs/products
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Active, retrospective reflection upon the use curriulum materials seems to boosts the teachers’
professional development. Using curriculum materials can be a practical and low effort way to enhance teachers’ PCK and practical knowledge – probably especially when working in groups, or otherwise sharing their experiences and reflections with each other.
CONCLUSIONS
The teachers use the curriculum materials more or less as intended by ENGAGE, but with minor adaptions. The adaptions, however, can greatly change the impact of the lesson on the students. Adaptions are often motivated by the teachers aim for the lesson, but also the needs of the class. Both the age of the students and the teachers’ practical knowledge seems to affect the teachers’ aims and adaptions.
The teachers seem to use their PCK much more actively in their reflections regarding adaptions and class management after the lessons, than before the lessons, suggesting an improvement in their PCK, practical knowledge and reflection. This further suggests that teachers can use curriculum materials not only for variation in their teaching, but also as a means of boosting their own professional development.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to the pre-service and in-service teachers that took part in this study, to my fellow ENGAGE partner, Harald Bjar at the University of
Southeast-Norway and to professor Berit Bungum at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology for valuable input, help and inspiration.
REFERENCES
Bayram-Jacobs, D., Henze, I., Evagorou, M., Shwartz, Y., Aschim, E., Alcaraz-Domínguez, S., Dagan, E., Barajas, M (2017) Exploring the impact of educative materials on teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge, Conference paper ESERA 2017 Beyer, C. J., & Davis, E. A. (2012) Learning to critique and adapt science curriculum
materials: Examining the development of preservice elementary teachers' pedagogical content knowledge. Science Education, 96(1), 130-157.
Ekborg, M., Ottander, C., Silfver, E. & Simon, S. (2013) Teachers’ Experience of Working with Socio-scientific Issues: A Large Scale and in-Depth Study. Research in Science Education, 42(2), 599-617
Magnusson, S., Krajcik, J., & Borko, H. (1999). Nature, sources, and development of pedagogical content knowledge for science teaching. In J. Gess-Newsome & N. G.
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Lederman (Eds.), Examining pedagogical content knowledge (pp. 95–132). Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
Roberts, D. A. (2007). Scientific literacy/science literacy. In S. K. Abell & N. G. Lederman (Eds.), Handbook of research on science education (pp. 729–780). Mahwah:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Simonneaux, L., & Simonneaux, J. (2008). Students‟ socio-scientific reasoning on
controversies from the viewpoint of education for sustainable development. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 4(3), 657–687.
van Driel, J. H., Beijaard, D., & Verloop, N. (2001) Professional development and reform in science education: The role of teachers' practical knowledge. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 38(2), 137-158.
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Martin Braund: Crossing borders in using drama to teach science. What is required for teachers to use physical role-plays most effectively?
Crossing borders in using drama to teach science. What is required for teachers to use physical role-plays most effectively?
Martin Braund*
Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town, South Africa
* Corresponding author e-mail address: martin.braund@york.ac.uk; braundm@cput.ac.za
Abstract
Drama can be successful in building knowledge and understanding in science as part of a socio-linguistic, constructivist approach. Role-plays, where learners act as analogues for components and processes, help access abstract ideas. However, a problem restricting many science teachers using these approaches has been that they may lack sufficient pedagogical knowledge of drama or might assume that these methods are best suited to teaching in the arts. The Drama in Science Research Group in Cape Town South Africa has addressed these issues by studying how two groups of student teachers adopted and handled role-plays to teach a number of science topics in grades 6 and 7. The first group of students were drama specialists and the second science specialists. Thus, for the drama specialists the pedagogical border-crossing was from drama into science and for the science specialists it was for drama to be incorporated to serve the learning of science. Data collection involved interviews with student teachers before and after their lessons, video recording of lessons, field notes and post-lesson interviews with selected groups of pupils. Findings show that role-plays can act as sufficient border crossing objects and have positive outcomes for pupil learning even when lessons are not particularly well executed. Drama specialists used more variety of effective drama methods but both groups of students required development to link learners’ actions to concepts and to provide more suitable analogues and sufficient learner autonomy in using role-plays. We see drama as an important tool in science teaching and use the findings to suggest conditions necessary for science teachers that could make them better users of drama to teach science.
Keywords: Drama, curriculum, pedagogy, role-play
INTRODUCTION
Drama is advocated as a way of helping access concepts in science through learners’ active involvement in analogous learning, for example using physical role-plays (Aubusson and Fogwill, 2006). However, teachers may be reluctant to use drama methods because they fear pupils’ disruptive behaviour or lack sufficient training and expertise in drama pedagogy (Fels and Meyer, 1997). Thus, for the science specialist, there may be border crossings to be negotiated from adopting drama into their pedagogy for science. A border might also exist in the reverse direction for the drama specialist teaching science. Consequently, a group of researchers at a university in South Africa studied ways in which drama specialist student teachers training to teach in the General Education and Training (GET) band (Grade R-Grade 9) prepared and taught science topics using physical role-plays. Outcomes from this first phase were used to train a second group of students who were science specialists, studied in the same way.
Questions addressed by the study were: what are critical episodes of teaching using physical role-play that lead to successes or hindrances for learners and how do these critical episodes compare for the two groups of student teachers; drama and science? A question was also addressed to compare the impact of role-plays for equivalent classes taught the same content
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using drama compared with non-drama lessons. This was done using a post-test of questions linked to the target concepts to collect quantitative data and calculate an effect size for role-play use.