Multilingual Science Theater Example

Oct 10, 2024

Teacher Kassie, 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 researcher explains the implications of using Science Theater with your students. This work was part of the Promoting Asset-based Science Teaching for Emergent Language Learners (PASTEL) project, funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

Learn More

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.

Related Posts

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