Abstract
This dissertation project consists of three papers that collectively explored how youth engage in collaborative creative processes when they work together to create artistic products and embodied representations and dramatizations that support STEM learning. All three papers used interaction analysis as a method for video analysis for a step-by-step exploration of participants’ interactions among each other and the environment. Findings suggest that artistic and embodied representations of science afford 4th, 5th, and 6th grade students opportunities to make meaning of science learning in novel and personal ways which support engagement. Youth enacted role-playing and embodied dramatizing practices, coordinated their collective creations, alternated effectively between inquiring and creating, and leveraged artistic practices and skills they already possessed. The embodied dramatizing tasks provided opportunities for affective engagement and excitement. Students used and transformed creatively the space and the materials of the environment to extend their embodied representations. The embodied activities and fictional contexts assisted collaboration, and participants did not always need words for their communication; gestures, actions, body postures, use of props as signs often substituted verbal communication. Furthermore, during these embodiments of science, students affirmed their social, ideational, and cultural funds of knowledge.