Search for: All records

In this paper, we use case study analysis of interviews with twelve white physics faculty to claim that physics expertise functions as white property, drawing on Harris’ definition of property as “every thing to which a [person] may attach a value and have a right” (Madison, 1906, as cited in Harris 1993, p. 1726). In particular, we use quotes from interviews to illustrate that physics expertise confers benefits to its holders, is jealously guarded, and is structurally protected. Faculty treat expertise as a marker of epistemic superiority in a discipline that is rooted in ideals of objectivity and neutrality, and they enforce contingencies around who can become a physicist, drawing on narratives that rely on those ideals. This argument has implications for a more just physics—one that divests from the property interest in physics expertise and invests in what Harris has called distributive justice, which centers a right to inclusion over a right to exclude. 

Gutiérrez’s equity framework, derived from mathematics education research, defines equity in terms of four dimensions: , , , and . and yield outcomes that reify the while and transform schooling to redistribute power. We use Gutiérrez’s equity framework to study discourse about equity from 36 high school physics teachers who participated in an equity-focused professional development workshop. We found that the teachers’ equity discourse often includes aspects of the identity dimension, yet teachers tend to frame identity using what we call a deficit lens. That is, although teachers agree that student identity matters in equity work, they often treat student identity as a way to support and and as a reflection of why students are not “successful.” In Gutiérrez’s words, this means centering equity work on teaching students to “play the game.” We also found that the power dimension, which supports students in “changing the game,” tends to be rare in teachers’ discourse about equity and is often presented with varied interpretations. Our findings then suggest that teachers’ equity framings of identity and power reflect physics education scholarship and dominant narratives, which leads to the call for a collective effort to challenge and reframe identity in physics in relation to power. 

In this paper, we describe the development and preliminary assessment of ACORN Physics Tutorials, which are designed to elicit and build on common conceptual resources for understanding physics. We articulate our design principles and instructional commitments and how these bear out in the specifics of one ACORN Physics Tutorial about electric circuits. We describe preliminary results from research on the implementation of the circuits ACORN Physics Tutorials. Namely, we observe students’ sensemaking in real time as they complete worksheets; we document shifts in students’ performance and use of specific conceptual resources from pre- to postinstruction using ACORN Physics Tutorials; and we show that students generally perceive their ideas to have mattered as they work with their peers on these worksheets. We hope these results can inform instructor decision making about the appropriateness of ACORN Physics Tutorials for their local contexts. 

Physics Education Research has a rich history of identifying common student ideas about specific physics topics. In the context of electric circuits, existing research on students’ ideas has primarily focused on misconceptions, misunderstandings, and difficulties. In this paper, we take a resource-oriented approach to identifying common student ideas about circuits by characterizing ideas we see as generative “seeds of science” that could form the basis of more sophisticated understandings. Based on our analysis of 1557 university physics student responses to five conceptual questions, we identify four common resources for understanding circuits. Published by the American Physical Society2024