Multilingual Science Theater Example

Oct 10, 2024

A 3rd grade science teacher explains how she set up her class of Spanish-speaking students to write and perform Science Theater sketches as a way to explain the impacts of dams on the life cycle of salmon. Then an education research explains the implications of using Science Theater with your students.

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Equity

  • Embodied dramatizing pushes back on the Western body-mind split, and on classroom management practices that emphasize the policing and control of students’ bodies–particularly Black and Brown bodies
  • Science theater disrupts the division between the sciences and the arts, allowing a connection to “arts-based ways of knowing that align with Indigenous pedagogies that celebrate holistic ways of experiencing the world instead of privileging disembodied explanations of reality”
  • Embodied performance can be multimodal, playful, and joyful
  • Science theater can be multilingual, embrace translanguaging, and create space for students to articulate science concepts in their own words

Research

Read more about how science theater can resist a mind-body divide: Varelas, M., Kotler, R. T., Natividad, H. D., Phillips, N. C., Tsachor, R. P., Woodard, R., Gutierrez, M., Melchor, M. A., & Rosario, M. (2022). “Science theatre makes you good at science”: Affordances of embodied performances in urban elementary science classrooms. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 9(4), 493-528.

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This site is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through Award #1907471 and #1315995