Drama as a learning medium in science education

To respond to the decline of young people’s interest in the sciences, calls have been made to reorganize the ways in which science is taught, in order to address low student motivation. Drama offers a toolbox of techniques that can be used when teaching science and which can address the issue of low student motivation. This chapter provides science teacher educators with the theoretical and practical knowledge of how drama may serve as an inquiry-based teaching and learning tool in the sciences and how it may increase students’ scientific literacy, engagement and motivation. We discuss aspects of teacher training for the use of drama in the science classroom with two sample workshops aimed at teachers’ professional development. Hereafter we describe some conventions offered by the genre process drama. We discuss the learning achieved through drama. We then show that drama can be an inquiry-based learning form which functions through narrative and is multimodal, multisensory and sociocultural. We address the potential of a budding researcher and give some aspects of a future scenario for inquiry-based learning focusing on depth of learning through embodiment