Analysing and Applying Different Theoretical Frameworks to Make Sense of Dialogue in Science Lessons Using Drama

The ways that teachers orient students to engage with science through drama influences how they think about it. By acting in character or positioning students to reflect on a scientist’s work critically, for example, by questioning someone in the ‘hot seat’, drama can position learners to think about science in quite different ways. Dramatising classroom activities, consequently, offers students quite distinct alternate experiences for learning science which can be captured digitally. This chapter argues how transcriptions of video and audio recordings can be used to consider ways that drama supports learning about science. Analysing these digitised sets of data can aid educators, who adopt various drama conventions, to think about how their pedagogic approaches orient classroom exchanges to best support science learning. Paying attention to the dialogue that emerges between learners is relevant to consider when choosing to use a particular drama approach to teach science. Providing directions to follow and act-out a prescribed play can limit the extent to which the learners think about science. Positioning students to question someone ‘in-role’ as a scientific character can develop an appreciation of their scientific work and the ways that scientists from the past made discoveries. Placing learners in small groups to work collaboratively and respond to an inquiry that echoes with challenges scientists faced in the past, and indeed the present, extends how they think about scientists’ lives and work. The implications of these alternate approaches are considered to emphasise how a teacher’s employment of drama strategies can appreciably influence how learners think about and engage with learning science.