Embodied Performances in Science Class: Multimodal Spaces and Places of Knowledge and Identity Construction

• In Event: Participation, Understanding, and Reasoning in Science Education

Abstract

As part of a school-university partnership, first through sixth-grade science teachers facilitated students dramatizing of science ideas, phenomena, and processes. We explored how the children’s semiotic choices in their embodied performances emerged to develop and communicate the children’s meaning-making and positioning as science doers. The study findings reveal the generative nature of embodiments afforded by (a) the resources available, (b) children’s own particular interests and sources of excitement, and (c) the simultaneous use of multiple semiotic tools that offer different affordances for meaning-making. We discuss how embodied performances provide opportunities to desettle expected norms associated with science meaning-making as children are allowed and encouraged to draw from a range of multimodal resources, including movements of their own bodies.

Authors

• Amanda R. Diaz, California State University - Fullerton
  Presenting Author

• Maria Varelas, University of Illinois Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca Woodard, University of Illinois At Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca Kotler, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Ronan Rock, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Nathan C. Phillips, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Rachelle Tsachor, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Zachary Sabitt, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jaegen Ellison
  Non-Presenting Author