Role playing in Math & Science?
Apr 2nd, 2009 by Steffanie Reid
According to Resnick and Wilensky (1998)1 , while role-playing activities have been commonly used in social studies classrooms, they have been infrequently used in science and mathematics classrooms. Speculate on why role playing activities may not be promoted in math and science and elaborate on your opinion on whether activities such as role playing should be promoted. Draw upon embodied learning in your response.
Role playing is an activity that seems especially well-suited to the humanities classroom. Students learn about a character by reading a novel and then exemplify their understanding of the character by acting out they way they think the character would behave in a given situation. In social studies a student could take on the role of Napoleon or Adolph Hitler and help the pages of the textbook “come alive”.
The practicality of role playing in the science or math classroom is not nearly as obvious as in the humanities classroom. If you asked a student to role-play an exponential curve they would likely look at you as though you’d grown a second head. However, from reading Colella (2000) and Roschelle (2003) I have realized that there is definitely a place for roll playing in the science and math classroom. Colella describes an example of embodied learning, where students utilize a small technological device to explore the way in which infectious diseases spread. The students were completely immersed in the experience, remarking about whether they were healthy or sick, expressing emotion against those who they deemed to have infected them, and arguing about the best ways to structure experiments to determine the causes of infection. I was very impressed with the personal ownership the students took of their own learning in this example. Role playing activities such as this one, where the students are actively involved in their learning and have the freedom to structure their own experiments, should definitely be promoted in the science classroom.
Winn (2002) described an interesting theory of learning where the students’ perception of the environment is considered along with the environments effect on the students. This is exemplified in the aforementioned disease example, as the students structure the experiments, then the feedback they get from the role playing game structures their understanding of the concept and points them in new directions of experimentation.
I would be interested in hearing about any such role playing experiments in the math classroom. Has anyone heard, or had experience with role playing in the math classroom?
References:
Colella, V. (2000). Participatory simulations: Building collaborative understanding through immersive dynamic modeling. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 9(4), 471-500. UBC library: full-text available online
Roschelle, J. (2003). Unlocking the learning value of wireless mobile devices. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 19(3), 260-272.
Winn, W. (2002). Learning in Artificial Environments: Embodiment, Embeddedness and Dynamic Adaptation, Tech. Inst. Cognition and Learning, Vol.1