Travelling through time in a process drama on plastic pollution – temporality in teaching about the complexity of wicked problems

The understanding of sustainability issues and preparedness to take action towards a sustainable future involves abilities to navigate between past, present, and future. This paper explores how the use of imaginary transitions in time – in the form of historying, and futuring in process drama – may afford student understanding of the wicked problem of plastics. The study draws on a design-based research study on process drama in upper-secondary school chemistry teaching which was conducted in collaboration with two teachers. During the process drama, the students and teachers travel in time to explore the uses of plastic; the motives and needs for using plastic as well as the consequences of plastic use in the form of plastic pollution today and in the future. The collected data consist of video- and audio recordings, which were analysed through qualitative content analysis that discerned how the students connected the temporalities, and which dimensions of the plastic problem were made visible in the temporal movements in the process drama. Our findings indicate that the temporal transitions made visible several dimensions of the plastic issue, and contributed to adding layers of complexity to the issue of plastics.