Abstract
Researchers have often noted the potential of the performing arts to support STEM education – especially in heterogeneous classrooms. This article reports on the implementation of a science theatre project in a secondary school class located in a disadvantaged area of Hamburg (Germany). In the accompanying research study, effects on students' interest in STEM and artistic expression were surveyed. Data analysis using t-tests shows that the artistic work significantly increased students' interest in physics and chemistry, and specifically in the process of galvanization, the project's focus topic. The analysis also revealed a growth in students' knowledge of cultural practices, self-confidence, joy in individual artistic expression, and classroom spirit during the course of the project.
Highlights
In today's schools, globalization is progressively increasing diversity as students from a broad spectrum of social, ethnical, and personal backgrounds bring a wide range of cultural habits and practices, expectations and beliefs, interests and languages to the classroom
Analysis of the participants' interest in chemistry, physics, and galvanization shows an increase for all three dimensions
Adding to the growing body of research into STEAM and art-informed education in STEM, this report showed the positive impacts of a science theatre project on student interest in physics, chemistry, galvanization, and artistic practices
Summary
In today's schools, globalization is progressively increasing diversity as students from a broad spectrum of social, ethnical, and personal backgrounds bring a wide range of cultural habits and practices, expectations and beliefs, interests and languages to the classroom. Standard classroom teaching in Western industrialized societies supports and reproduces a unitary and linear concept of science, one that is communicated and supported via teacher-centered and recipe-like instructional techniques. This way, "conceptual practices of culturally others" (van Eijck & Roth, 2011) are excluded from Western science and science education. One potentially very effective way to promote culturally diverse and inclusive science and technology education is to connect it to creativity and the arts (Reif & Grant, 2010; Madirosian, 2003). I describe and analyze how a performing-arts informed teaching project about galvanization affected classroom learning with 13- to 16-year-old girls and boys at a German district school. The study focuses on the question, if the science theatre project helped to increase students' interest in physics, chemistry, galvanization, and artistic practice
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