This chapter targets process drama in chemistry education, as a potential means of enabling student engagement with “wicked” sustainability issues to promote anticipatory competence and provide readiness to act for a sustainable future. Here, students and teachers are assigned roles as researchers, politicians, and journalists, travel in time to explore the motives and consequences of using plastic (e.g. plastic pollution). The process drama enables the students to shift perspectives between past, present, and future, with the potential to make aspects of the plastic issue visible to the students in ways that would not have been possible if the process drama had only taken place in the present. The process drama described in this chapter can be a framework and inspiration to use not only in chemistry teaching, but also in other science subjects, and in combination with other disciplines, to integrate wicked problems into teaching.

The understanding of sustainability issues and preparedness to take action towards a sustainable future involves abilities to navigate between past, present, and future. This paper explores how the use of imaginary transitions in time – in the form of historying, and futuring in process drama – may afford student understanding of the wicked problem of plastics. The study draws on a design-based research study on process drama in upper-secondary school chemistry teaching which was conducted in collaboration with two teachers. During the process drama, the students and teachers travel in time to explore the uses of plastic; the motives and needs for using plastic as well as the consequences of plastic use in the form of plastic pollution today and in the future. The collected data consist of video- and audio recordings, which were analysed through qualitative content analysis that discerned how the students connected the temporalities, and which dimensions of the plastic problem were made visible in the temporal movements in the process drama. Our findings indicate that the temporal transitions made visible several dimensions of the plastic issue, and contributed to adding layers of complexity to the issue of plastics.

The aim of this dissertation is to advance knowledge about how different forms of drama in upper secondary chemistry education can support students’ learning in chemistry, spanning from disciplinary to humanistic perspectives, and how the drama may be designed to achieve that purpose. Teaching and learning are understood as complex processes of social interaction drawing on sociocultural and social-semiotic perspectives. The dissertation is based on two design-based research projects in upper secondary chemistry education. Project 1 focuses on disciplinary learning, and was conducted in three cycles in two different schools in collaboration with one teacher. Project 1 seeks to answer the first overarching research question: (1) In what ways can creative drama support students’ conceptual learning of electronegativity and chemical bonding in upper secondary chemistry education? Project 2 focuses on humanistic approaches, and was conducted in two cycles in two different schools in collaboration with three teachers. Project 2 seeks to answer the second overarching research question: (2) In what ways can process drama support students’ learning about wicked problems in upper secondary chemistry education? In both projects, research lessons were designed in an iterative process of collaboration with teachers and the lessons were implemented during ordinary teaching. The research lessons were video- and/or audiotaped. Findings from the dissertation are presented in four papers. Paper I shows, based on a social semiotic analysis, how creative drama may afford student meaning-making of abstract non-spontaneous chemical concepts related to chemical bonding. The creative drama supported different types of transductions and transformations which may afford student exploration of intra- and intermolecular forces, in particular when students use bodily mode in combination with other semiotic resources. Paper II reveals, based on a qualitative content analysis, that the creative drama activities enabled the students to bodily move between chemistry’s sub-micro and macro levels, and link the electronegativity and polarity of molecules to formations of molecular grid structures to represent how molecules are organised in different states of matter. Paper III shows, based on a qualitative content analysis, how a process drama dealing with the wicked problem of plastic waste/use enabled students and teachers to talk about plastic pollution and plastic use while drawing on perspectives of science as well as values and social science. Paper IV reports, based on a qualitative content analysis, how the use of imaginary transitions in time – in the form of historying and futuring in process drama – can afford nuanced understandings of wicked problems and a readiness to act for the future. Taken together, this dissertation contributes with knowledge about the bodily position as a semiotic resource, the importance of how the roles and the fictional situations are crafted for student learning, as well as how different features in the design of drama promote students’ collaborative engagement in chemistry. Based on the findings, design principles for designing creative drama and process drama in chemistry education are proposed.

This study targets a special form of educational drama called process drama, as a potential means for enabling student engagement with wicked problems. The overarching aim is to explore how process drama may afford student agency in dealing with wicked problems in upper secondary chemistry education. It is a design-based study with two cycles of intervention in two schools. A process drama plan was designed to focus on the wicked problem of plastic pollution. The interventions were video- and audiotaped and thereafter transcribed. The data were analysed using a combination of qualitative content analysis and a sociocultural framework of the two dialectics agency|structure and margin|centre. The analysis resulted in three themes regarding how plastic pollution and plastic use was explored in the process drama. The students participated in a constant flow between margin and centre where different spaces for students’ agency was afforded. In brief, our main finding is that process drama enables students and teachers to participate in a variety of ways in the exploration of wicked problems, and talk about plastic pollution and plastic use, while drawing on knowledge and perspectives of science as well as values and societal and social science perspectives and knowledge.

The advancement of participatory methodologies and educational action research has raised challenges of research ethics that concern the relations between different actors. Different forms of participatory research rest on cooperation between teachers, researchers, and students in different forms of relations. The ways in which these relations are enacted are often related to research objectives, epistemology, the people involved in the study, and the context in which the study is carried out. In this chapter we seek to disentangle some ethical challenges emerging from three different teacher-researcher collaborations in science education research. What values are at stake and what are the potential tensions in attempting to secure different values? This includes the ethical implications of requiring shared responsibility between teachers and researchers in development of educational practices and knowledge generation. We discuss how different forms of teacher-researcher collaboration transform ethics and epistemology and how the ethics and epistemology become intertwined. In addition to standard ethical reflection, an ethics of participatory research in science education has to include considerations of the ontological, epistemological, and methodological values at stake.

Getting students to understand the particulate nature of matter is a major challenge for chemistry education. In upper secondary school students commonly struggle to distinguish between intra- and intermolecular bonding and analyse chemical bonding in terms of electronegativity. In this study, we explore how creative drama may be used in chemistry education to facilitate students’ explorations of electronegativity and chemical bonding in Swedish upper secondary chemistry education. The study was conducted as a design-based intervention in three cycles in two schools. The interventions (which lasted for 30–60 minutes) were single-lesson-interventions consisting of drama activities and discussions in whole-class and student groups. A qualitative content analysis produced themes that captured the ways in which the students explored electronegativity and chemical bonding and how creative drama enabled collective student agency. The findings indicate that creative drama enabled the students to link the electronegativity and polarity of molecules to formations of molecular grid structures using their own bodies to represent how molecules were organised in different states of matter. The results also indicate that creative drama in chemistry education may enhance student agency in their explorations of electronegativity and the linking of electronegativity to intramolecular and intermolecular bonding.

A major challenge for chemistry education is to develop the students' understanding of chemical bonding. In upper-secondary school, the challenges are commonly expressed as difficulties for students to distinguish between intra and intermolecular bonding and to understand chemical bonding in terms of electronegativity. The aim of this thesis is to investigate in what ways creative drama can support the students' learning of non-spontaneous chemical concepts related to electronegativity and chemical bonding. Drama has previously been suggested to support science learning, but studies in science education are limited and the potential of using drama to afford student theoretical reasoning in chemistry needs further scrutiny and design development. In the study which forms the basis of the thesis, socio-cultural theory of learning is combined with multimodal social semiotic analysis. The study was conducted as a design-based study with interventions in three cycles in two schools. The interventions, including the drama activity and students group discussions before and after, were video-and audiotaped. In Article 1, data from cycle 2 was analyzed with respect to what kind of semiotic work students were engaged in. In Article 2, the data from cycles 1, 2 and 3 were analyzed on the basis of thematic content analysis resulting in themes regarding in what ways the students explored electronegativity and chemical bonding and in what ways creative drama afforded collective student agency. The main findings point to the importance of meaning-making through transduction to develop students' conceptual understanding of chemical bonding. In the students' semiotic work, it was possible to create relations between electronegativity and the polarity of molecules and to link the polarity of the molecules to intermolecular bonding in the collective whole class interaction, which in turn is a prerequisite for understanding phase changes. The interaction between the student groups was pivotal for linking the chemistry's sub-micro and macro levels. Further, the results show that the students' bodily formations of molecules in certain groups prompted semiotic work in other groups, which got consequences for the students’ collective agency. The visualization of the students' bodily formations created opportunities for students to pay attention to differences in representations of chemical bonding. A notion called epistemic dissonance is introduced to account for the emergent epistemic tensions/contradictions that become recognized by the students in the creative drama. Emergent epistemic dissonances constitute opportunities for collective work concerning the conceptual relations where students act as learning resources for oneanother. This thesis points to the importance of designing creative drama in such ways that both the material and social structure may support the students' collective agency.

En stor utmaning för kemiutbildning är att utveckla elevernas förståelse för kemisk bindning. I gymnasieskolan uttrycks utmaningarna som svårigheter för elever att skilja mellan intra och intermolekylär bindning och att förstå kemisk bindning utifrån elektronegativitet. Syftet med den här avhandlingen är att undersöka på vilka sätt kreativt drama kan stödja elevernas lärande av icke-spontana kemiska begrepp relaterade till elektronegativitet och kemisk bindning. Drama är ett sätt att undervisa som har visat sig stödja lärande, men studier inom kemiutbildningen är begränsade och möjligheten att använda drama behöver ytterligare granskning och designutveckling. I studien som ligger till grund för avhandlingen kombineras sociokulturell teori om lärande med multimodal socialsemiotisk analys. En designbaserad studie i tre cykler av interventioner har genomförts i två skolor, vilka inkluderade drama aktiviteter och elevers diskussioner i grupper före och efter dramaaktiviteten. Interaktionerna i klassrummet video och ljudinspelades. I artikel 1 analyserades datamaterialet från cykel 2, utifrån vilken typ av semiotiskt arbete eleverna engagerade sig i när de fick möjlighet att använda sina egna kroppar som semiotiska resurser. I artikel 2 analyserades datamaterialet från cykel 1, 2 och 3, utifrån tematisk innehållsanalys som genererade teman som visade på vilka sätt eleverna undersökte elektronegativitet och kemisk bindning samt på vilka sätt kreativt drama öppnade upp för elevernas kollektiva agens. Huvudresultaten pekar på betydelsen av meningsskapande genom transduktion för att öka elevernas begreppsliga förståelse av kemisk bindning, vilket kan främjas av att eleverna får kombinera artefaktskapande med kroppslig gestaltning. I elevernas semiotiska arbete möjliggjordes att skapa relationer mellan elektronegativitet och molekylers polaritet samt att i den kollektiva helklassinteraktion länka molekylernas polaritet till intermolekylär bindning, vilket i sin tur är en förutsättning för att förstå fasändringar på makronivå. Interaktionen mellan elevgrupperna var avgörande för eleverna att koppla ihop kemins submikro och makronivåer med varandra. Vidare visar resultaten att gruppernas kroppsliga formationer av molekyler i vissa grupper drev på semiotiskt arbete i andra grupper, vilket fick betydelse för den kollektiva agensen. Vid alla observerade lektionstillfällen uppstod ett behov "att veta varför". I dramat skapades möjligheter för eleverna att själva uppmärksamma sådant som inte stämde överens mellan olika gestalningar av kemisk binding. Vi har valt att benämna detta som epistemisk dissonans. Epistemisk dissonans som uppstår i det kreativa dramat hanteras kollektivt av eleverna som fungerar som läroresurser för varandra. Avhandlingens resultat pekar på vikten av att designa kreativt drama så att både den materiella och sociala strukturen kan gynna elevernas kollektiva agens.

Drama is a way of teaching that has been suggested to support learning, but studies in science education are limited and the potential of using drama needs further scrutiny and design development. In this study, from an upper secondary school in Sweden, we investigate how creative drama may afford students’ meaning-making of abstract non-spontaneous chemical concepts, by exploring what kind of semiotic work students are engaged in when given the opportunity to use their own bodies as semiotic resources. We combine sociocultural theory of learning with multimodal social semiotic analysis. In our analysis, we found different types of transductions and transformations that had consequences for students' meaning-making. A conclusion is that when creative drama activities open up for students to use bodily mode in combination with a variety of other semiotic resources, the students are afforded to explore intermolecular forces in new ways.