The presidential election of the human body: applying contextual learning to promote connections between the student and the curricular content

Abstract

Using real-world situations to engage students in learning specific content is advocated by educational research as an effective strategy. However, motivating students to establish personal and emotional connections with the curricular content is challenging. We presented a didactic strategy named “the presidential election of the human body,” created to use the presidential election context to engage students in studying cell function and structure using role-playing and appropriation of scientific concepts. Four groups of students ( n = 124) of the science and mathematics teacher training program chose a cell of the human body to impersonate, they studied the biology of their cell, and they ran in a presidential election campaign. They created slogans, videos, and materials for their campaign, and on the day of the election the group of students voted for the best slogan. The didactic strategy was capable of stimulating the appropriation of the characteristics of the cells they represented. The majority (75%) of the elected candidates represented cells that are linked to the nervous system. Musicality and humor were the most frequent styles that appeared in the slogans. Students strongly agreed that they enjoyed the activity and considered it valuable for contextualizing the learning of anatomy and physiology. Thus, the activity is a didactic resource to stimulate the students to embrace the content they are learning in the contextualized momentum of a presidential election.