“You Get to Move Around Which in Science You Cannot Do”: Children's Identity Work and Positioning in Dramatizing Science

ABSTRACT A growing interest in leveraging the arts, and particularly the performing arts, to disrupt prevailing paradigms in science education that uphold the mind–body divide and privilege the mind and thinking over the body and feeling, and to create engaging and meaningful learning experiences, has led to a school–university/research–practice partnership to design and study ways to strengthen science learning by engaging in science theatre. In this instrumental case study, we drew on identity theory and positioning theory to study how theatre/dramatizing in science classes disrupt prevailing science narratives. We learned from students in fifth‐ and sixth‐grade science classes in an urban public school that serves predominantly bilingual, emergent bilingual, and multilingual children, many children of color, and many immigrants or with families who have immigrated in the United States, and who have experienced a “science–arts borderland” for a school year. The children's narratives and their practice, with the multimodal discourse acts in it, showed that the theatre/dramatizing experiences they had in their science classes catalyzed “bends” of the prevailing storylines related to science and science learning that were part of their identity negotiations. Three theatre norms/practices catalyzed three “bends” and expanded storylines. First, the collectivity of theatre bent the dominant storyline of individual success and struggle in science learning and offered children ways of seeing themselves as helping each other learn in collective ways. Second, the engagement through effort and commitment valued in theatre bent the dominant storyline of correctness valued in science learning and allowed children to embrace mistakes as part of learning. Third, the multiple forms of recognition in ensemble theatre work bent the dominant storyline of narrow ways one gets recognized in science class, expanding how children saw themselves and their peers and how peers and teachers saw them as knowledge producers.