Data for the eight student teachers are shown in Table 2. The numbers of positive and negative critical episodes are shown in separate columns but without stating what each of these episodes involved. The F value for the effect of the difference between the mean test
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scores for the drama versus non-drama lessons is shown in the last column. In all cases this was a positive value showing that role-play lessons had advantages for pupils’ learning except for Stacey (F = -0.25) where her drama lesson did not result in any learning gain, indeed pupils in the non-drama group seeming to benefit more. Numerical data were not available for Sally and Ricci as they did not submit any test results.
Table 2. Critical teaching episodes and impacts of role-play lessons used by drama and science specialist student teachers.
Student teacher
Specialis m
Teaching topic/concepts
No. of +ve critical episodes
No. of –ve critical episodes
F value for effect of role-play
Annie Drama Planets (orbits) 4 4 0.3
Taneal Drama Solubility
(Particles) 4 4 0.97
Sally Drama Solar system (Sun,
moon, gravity/tides) 5 3 No data
Ricci Drama Cells (form and
function) 3 3 No data
Anthea Life Sciences
Sound and hearing (generation, transmission and reception)
3 6 0.55
Stacey Physical
Sciences Energy (Forms and
transformation) 6 5 -0.25
Elroy Physical
sciences Energy (Forms) 3 3 0.35
Kim Life
Sciences
Cells (nucleus, chromosome
functions) 6 2 0.43
In most cases there was a balance between the number of critical teaching episodes when compared with negative ones, except in the cases of Anthea (3+ and 6 -) and Kim (6 + and 2 -). For the drama, student teachers most commonly recorded positive teaching episodes involved: thoroughly preparing space for the role-plays, allowing learner autonomy in designing and performing role-plays, using warm-up activities, intervening by using encouraging discourse and ensuring that as many learners as possible could be engaged or at least be involved peripherally in an activity (class sizes can be very large in South Africa and was 60+ learners for Taneal, Ricci and Kim). Negative critical episodes for the drama
students most commonly involved a failure to link concepts sufficiently to the actions being played out. For example, in Annie’s lesson learners modelled the rotations and orbits of the
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Sun, Earth, Moon and planets. At one stage in the enactment she stopped the action and asked learners, “Right, can you all see the sun, yes or no?” In all cases learners’ responses were simply, “yes” or “no”, depending on their orientations to the light from ‘the sun’ (a bight bedside lamp). There was no attempt to link these observations to the idea of night and day, or that different rotation speeds of planets produce different lengths of day and night. There was only one case, Sally, where opportunities were provided for learners to critique role-plays in terms of their accuracy for portraying the science concepts involved.
The science specialist student teachers also prepared spaces well for their learners to use role-plays but did not use warm-ups as some Drama students did and they tended to manage activities in less inclusive ways and to provide much more structure and support. In two cases the suitability of the role-play as a designed activity to map against the science concepts to be taught could be questioned. This did not happen for the drama students. For example, Anthea (a Life Sciences student) provided supporting ‘role cards’ which resulted in her learners playing out scenarios that had little to do with the target concepts; generation, transmission and reception of sound waves by the human ear. One group played out a scenario of trying to gain attention for rescue from being stranded in the jungle by banging a drum. While the scenario had potential to address the science, the played out actions seemed to avoid them. It was as if her attempts were more to do with contextualising the role-play scenario than providing structure to include the science. At the post lesson interview Anthea said:
I included this scenario, about the drumming to call for help, because in some cultures it’s a form of communication… some of my learners come from the Congo … so maybe they know about it.
Possibly due to their lack of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) for drama, science student teachers tended to over-direct their learners’ role-play attempts, though this did not mean that outcomes were always negative. In the two lessons on energy, for example (by Stacey and Elroy), a creative space for learners seemed to emerge differently. In Stacey’s case the suggestions for actions to model energy types appeared trite and limited: miming a scream (for sound), falling off a chair (for gravitational potential energy) and so on. In Elroy’s case the suggestions for actions modelling energy were open and more subtle, representing more challenge in the representations. For example: powering a toy to ‘life’, water power for a mill, a car running out of petrol and cooking food in a forest using timber from trees. Thus, for Elroy, role-plays as ‘border objects’ were already ‘switched on’ for the learners and worked to a greater extent through his and his learners’ more imaginative designs. Whether this is just a characteristic of a creative student teacher, more open to interactive learner-centred methods is of course open to question. Putting it metaphorically, Elroy, by his pre-dispositions to learning, may already have had ‘one foot over the border’.
DISCUSSION
Our work with student teachers in Cape Town has allowed us insights into a number of aspects of how physical role-plays can best be used as a type of drama to teach science, mainly from a conceptual standpoint. As a border crossing from the pedagogy of drama into the pedagogy for science, physical role-plays successfully fulfil the role of the border crossing object to reduce pedagogical barriers for the science specialist anxious of using an
arts-derived teaching strategy. In this section, four aspects that seem the most important ones to
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discuss at this time and that emerge from our work are featured, for they are ones that allow us to reflect on how physical role-plays can be most effective.
Drama as analogous learning
Just like simulations, conceptual and physical models and some practical work, drama presents analogues of reality that are steps to understanding (Aubusson and Fogwill, 2006).
Thus, the movements of learners as actors playing a sperm cell, modelling the behaviour of atoms in a solution, being the cell wall of a plant cell and so on are not really like the movements, structures and forms in the real world but they can work as effective analogues and metaphors. Our observations (more so for the drama specialists), that there was a lack of linking from the drama to science reality, reminds us of a point made by Lemke (2000), that science has always used different modalities to communicate ideas, such as mathematics, diagrams, graphs and visualisations. His point is that whatever science teaching design is chosen we have hopes that sufficient concept linking is made (by the teacher for the pupils and by pupils themselves). The challenge, these student teachers did not always respond to, was to capitalise on the richness of pedagogy afforded by the drama simulations as a
communication mode. It strikes us that if high levels of interaction are used, such as in these drama simulations, the teacher must make extra effort to create conditions under which the purposes and expectations of activities are made clear for learners. For drama, simulating and portraying a scientific reality means making explicit links between body actions and
movements and phenomena, concepts and processes and crucially some dialogic space and conditions under which discussion as critique can take place.
Where to place drama in a learning sequence
I am often asked if drama activities are best carried out as topic summaries or revision exercises or used within the body of a teaching sequence to first teach the concepts to learners. We have found that teachers who intervene a lot ‘in the action’ can obtain good learning outcomes when using drama to teach new content. For example, we watched a student teacher (not reported in this paper) cover the ideas of plant and animal cells by creating a huge model of a cell with 50 pupils. This teacher explained what was happening as she directed the action. For example, she stopped the action and said, “That’s right you are the membrane but there are some holes between you that can let the little particles like water in and out – but, hey you big ones (sugar) you can’t get through, can you?” This example could be used at any time in the learning sequence, but maybe the more complex, self-directed role-plays like those attempted by Stacey and Elroy need some background science knowledge before the pupils devise and rehearse their actions and this could come from the teacher, books, the internet, and so on.
Managing the learning space
It is not always necessary to use a hall or studio for a science drama lesson, though if a teacher wants a few groups to work simultaneously or to have a large amount of free movement this might help. South African classrooms are overcrowded and cramped compared with many elsewhere but we have seen highly successful lessons with classes of over 80 pupils with just a few chairs and desks pushed back to the sides of the room. Having groups rehearse, and then each one portraying a concept or sequence and the rest of the class asking questions after their ‘performance’, works very well and helps make the drama inclusive.
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Avoiding the ‘fish bowl’ effect
One of the problems our drama student teachers had was expecting drama activities to have power to stand alone as learning experiences (they did this much more than the science specialist students) – they often chose to stand back and did not often help pupils connect actions with concepts. It was as if they had implicit faith in performance as learning. But drama for theatre is not the same as drama to learn science. Pupils should not have to act as if being observed by others from outside a “fish bowl”. Drama for science is not like acting a play for an audience – it is an example of ‘rough’ or ‘good enough’ drama (see Braund, 2015 for an explanation of this) where the experience must produce sufficient connections to help make content meaningful.