Whale tales
by Patrick Wolfinbarger • photographs Ted Brummond
Stick puppets. Talking raccoons. Wacky professors. Students dreaming through class.
Is this any way to learn about the origins of whales?
University of Wyoming College of Arts and Sciences faculty members, their students, and students at University Lab School think so.
Above: The video produced in CiCi Aragon's UW children's drama course. Below: The stage play by University Lab School drama students. |
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Within weeks of having his contributions to research uncovering the origins of whales published in the scientific journal Nature, UW's Mark Clementz watched as his work became a puppet show and a stage play with elements not usually found in science class.
Drama teacher Margaret Rattenbury and her middle school students at the Lab School produced the play, "The Prince of Whales: A Whimsical Story about the Evolution of Whales," based on a script by Clementz, a UW geology and geophysics assistant professor.
"I enjoyed the production immensely," Clementz says. "Margaret did a great job translating the script into something that would work as a live stage performance. The costumes perfectly captured the general appearance of the species of interest, and I thought the set design made the most of a few well-crafted props. Overall, an A-plus."
Clementz is a member of an international research team that bridged a 10-million-year gap in the fossil record of cetaceans—the marine mammal group that includes whales and dolphins. Examining fossils from Pakistan, researchers found cetaceans evolved from a raccoon-sized hoofed animal rather than hippo-like creatures.
A journal article featuring scientific terminology and obscure animal references may not be the best way to communicate the discovery to the public, let alone elementary and junior high students. But Cecilia (CiCi) Aragon, UW theatre and dance assistant professor, worked with Clementz to develop a more creative way for people to learn about the research.
Clementz and Aragon started talking last summer about adapting his research for the classroom. Discussions became a plan, and at "ReVisioning the (W)hole: among Poets, Philosophers and Physicists," a UW conference that explored interdisciplinary communication and collaboration held last September, a video of the resulting puppet show was shown. The video was based on a script Clementz wrote and Aragon adapted for her children's drama course.
"This project allowed us to reach out to a younger generation and get them excited about science," Clementz says.
"And, it created an opportunity to open a dialogue with students and the community about evolution and the history of life on earth. Finally, it gave me a chance to work with Cici and other artists in the fine arts program, which opened my eyes to new ways of getting science across to students. We've already begun discussing what to do next year."
The approach Aragon took in the classroom presented some challenges.
"For me, as a theater education professor teaching teachers how to use drama in the classroom, I had to convince the UW drama students that this is a worthwhile project," Aragon says. "For some theater students, paleobiology is not a sexy topic. It is a subject that many don't engage in, unless of course, it is required of them. So, communicating my vision of this project to them was of utmost importance."
Aragon also faced creating an environment where her students felt safe to be their "creative selves." Working with some Lab School students, the UW drama students learned about the challenges of teaching drama to children. In terms of a theatrical challenge, the UW students had to think about and understand movement in a different form, especially when producing a stick puppet production for video.
"Stick puppets leave very little room for movement," Aragon says. "The UW students are trained to use movement dimensionally on a stage. So moving puppets on a flat surface was a challenge, and having little space in the frame of a screen to move the puppets around seemed to be artistically and physically challenging. The students rose to the challenge."
Aragon says she absolutely is interested in continuing
with similar kinds of projects. "At times we didn't exactly know what the
outcome was going to be…we just had to trust
the process."
It wasn't enough just to see how this mixing of science and art would work in a college setting. Aragon had invited Margaret Rattenbury to the conference to see the video of the puppet show. That prompted Rattenbury work on adapting the script for a stage show. She presented it to her students, and it evolved, like the whales that were the subject of the tale.
"Mark and Cici drafted a story that is timeless: a lost ‘child,' Rhodocetus (an ancient whale), is looking for its mother, and along the way encounters sameness and difference in others," Rattenbury says.
Rattenbury encouraged her students to come up with their own adaptations. Seeking their involvement was also a learning experience for her. "Their comments, criticisms, and ideas were accepted, and they were allowed to work in small groups to expand the script. Their suggestions were varied, and the project could have fallen apart at a few points due to a lack of cohesion," Rattenbury says.
"Young people benefit from a leadership model that is flexible enough to allow for dissent, imaginative enough to be inclusive of the ideas of most stakeholders, and positive enough to provide a vision to see things through to completion. Providing that leadership model was an area of growth for me."
The class added scenes to the script, including a present-day classroom and a dream sequence that reaches 50 million years into the past. Members of the UW Geology Club helped students prepare for the play.
"Many characters were added, which allowed text from the original narrative to be heard as dialogue on stage and allowed a middle-school sense of humor to emerge," Rattenbury says.
The play features talking squirrels and raccoons, students portraying different species of whales with papier-mâché headgear, and funky-looking professors. Rattenbury and her students used large strips of teal cloth to emulate ocean waves, made an articulated papier-mâché whale hoisted on sticks that two students carried around, and incorporated multimedia to provide special focus on the history of mammals or special effects emulating a storm.
"I knew some about modern whales," says Karmen, an
eighth-grader at the Lab School who played a whale, created waves in the
background, and helped paint the reefs placed on stage. "But I didn't know a
lot about prehistoric whales before this. I learned a lot about them. We
were able to read through the play and we made it more interesting. It was
fun."
Rattenbury hopes this collaboration between science and art, university professors and public school teachers, and college and public school students continues in the future.
What next? The Discovery© Channel or the Disney© Channel?
"Hmmm, not sure. Those are both good suggestions," Clementz says. "I'll have to see what CiCi thinks."
