Using Arts-Based Methodologies: Facilitating First-Year Pre-Service Teachers' Collaborative Teaching of Cell Biology

Abstract

Even with well-prepared lectures, some of my students still struggled to understand some of the concepts of cell biology. I therefore wondered if an exploration of teaching methods involving the arts would help them to engage with the subject content in ways that made it more accessible, and help them to understand the concepts better. Building on earlier approaches of using collaborative learning, I requested students to discuss, plan, and present to each other on cell biology concepts using arts-based teaching methods. In groups of 4-6 members, they could use any strategy such as dance, drama, music, poetry, and drawing to teach the concepts. The students collaboratively prepared content for a concept of their choice and presented it using their chosen and developed teaching strategy. Some of the strategies that students seemed to enjoy using included rapping the concepts, songs, dance, role play, and poetry. A few students resorted to individual PowerPoint presentations. The hope was that the enjoyment would translate into students' familiarisation with and understanding of the concepts better than through traditional teaching. Although the approach demonstrated that students could teach these concepts in versatile and fun ways, it did not assess their understanding of the concepts presented.