A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Ethical Challenges of Symmetry in Participatory Science Education Research – Proposing a Heuristic for Ethical Reflection

  2020. Maria Andrée, Kerstin Danckwardt-Lillieström, Jonna Wiblom. Examining Ethics in Contemporary Science Education Research, 123-141

  Chapter

  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.

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• The drama of chemistry – supporting student explorations of electronegativity and chemical bonding through creative drama in upper secondary school

  2020. Kerstin Danckwardt-Lillieström, Maria Andrée, Margareta Enghag. International Journal of Science Education 42 (11), 1862-1894

  Article

  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.

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• Drama i kemisalen

  2019. Kerstin Danckwardt-Lillieström.

  Thesis (Lic)

  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.

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• Creative drama in chemistry education

  2018. Kerstin Danckwardt-Lillieström, Maria Andrée, Margareta Enghag. NorDiNa 14 (3), 250-266

  Article

  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.

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