A drama-based approach to engage secondary students in environmental issues

This paper presents drama as a tool to encourage secondary students to think about socio-scientific issues, and explore different perspectives and consequences for humans and the environment. In doing so, we connect to the educational framework, socio-scientific inquiry based learning, which integrates inquiry based science education, socio-scientific issues and citizenship education. In our approach, pupils were involved in multiple roles: authors of a script, actors performing the script and audience. So far, only a few empirical studies have been published concerning the effectiveness of drama in science education. Therefore we did a quasi-experimental study with two classes of 29 students engaged in drama-based inquiry learning and two similar groups doing an inquiry that ended with a presentation. Students had to select a recent environmental controversy in which different stakeholders expressed their contrasting viewpoints. Our analytical focus was on two aspects: pupils’ motivation towards science and pupils’ quality of argumentation as shown in their presentations/ performances. Students motivation towards learning science was measured by means of a questionnaire before and after the lesson series. These data were supplemented with qualitative data gathered via classroom observations and interviews with pupils. Results show a modest trend in drama promoting both pupils’ motivation towards learning about environmental issues and an improved quality of argumentation.