Bringing Chemistry to Life: Exploring how drama can support students’ learning in upper secondary chemistry education

Abstract in English

The aim of this dissertation is to advance knowledge about how different forms of drama in upper secondary chemistry education can support students’ learning in chemistry, spanning from disciplinary to humanistic perspectives, and how the drama may be designed to achieve that purpose. Teaching and learning are understood as complex processes of social interaction drawing on sociocultural and social-semiotic perspectives. The dissertation is based on two design-based research projects in upper secondary chemistry education. Project 1 focuses on disciplinary learning, and was conducted in three cycles in two different schools in collaboration with one teacher. Project 1 seeks to answer the first overarching research question: (1) In what ways can creative drama support students’ conceptual learning of electronegativity and chemical bonding in upper secondary chemistry education? Project 2 focuses on humanistic approaches, and was conducted in two cycles in two different schools in collaboration with three teachers. Project 2 seeks to answer the second overarching research question: (2) In what ways can process drama support students’ learning about wicked problems in upper secondary chemistry education? In both projects, research lessons were designed in an iterative process of collaboration with teachers and the lessons were implemented during ordinary teaching. The research lessons were video- and/or audiotaped. Findings from the dissertation are presented in four papers. Paper I shows, based on a social semiotic analysis, how creative drama may afford student meaning-making of abstract non-spontaneous chemical concepts related to chemical bonding. The creative drama supported different types of transductions and transformations which may afford student exploration of intra- and intermolecular forces, in particular when students use bodily mode in combination with other semiotic resources. Paper II reveals, based on a qualitative content analysis, that the creative drama activities enabled the students to bodily move between chemistry’s sub-micro and macro levels, and link the electronegativity and polarity of molecules to formations of molecular grid structures to represent how molecules are organised in different states of matter. Paper III shows, based on a qualitative content analysis, how a process drama dealing with the wicked problem of plastic waste/use enabled students and teachers to talk about plastic pollution and plastic use while drawing on perspectives of science as well as values and social science. Paper IV reports, based on a qualitative content analysis, how the use of imaginary transitions in time – in the form of historying and futuring in process drama – can afford nuanced understandings of wicked problems and a readiness to act for the future. Taken together, this dissertation contributes with knowledge about the bodily position as a semiotic resource, the importance of how the roles and the fictional situations are crafted for student learning, as well as how different features in the design of drama promote students’ collaborative engagement in chemistry. Based on the findings, design principles for designing creative drama and process drama in chemistry education are proposed.