New Methodological Approaches Toward Implementing HPS in Physics Education: The Landscape of Physics Education

Abstract

Physics is a human enterprise, yet that humanity is hidden from students. This chapter, authored by two current physics undergraduates and a teacher-researcher, highlights contextualized teaching methods that reintegrate physics into human context. Our metaphorical Landscape of Physics Education represents decontextualization by elevation, with greatest decontextualization at mountain peaks. It uses water to represent educators' contextualizing efforts, with greatest contextualization at sea level. At lowest elevations, physics is fully contextualized: teachers prioritize content and context; students' voices and identities are celebrated. Educators and students throughout this landscape are informed and inspired by: constructivism; nature of science (NOS); student voice; and gradings' adverse impacts. This chapter takes three tours through contextualizing efforts of the physics education research literature: Historical Experiments and Instruments; Contextualization through Narratives, and Feminist and Indigenous Experience. The Historical Experiments and Instruments Tour features teaching projects where students experiment with historical electromagnetic instruments in a museum, flatten gender hierarchies while learning electrostatics, and develop their own understandings of physical phenomena through partnering with historical investigations. It demonstrates how at low elevations, experiences embrace ambiguity and students: initiate questions; exercise agency; and form personal science identities. The Contextualization by Narratives Tour explores short, stand-alone narratives such as anecdotes, vignettes, short stories, case studies, and role-plays. In its low elevation examples, students co-created curriculum together with teacher researchers; their questions and personal experiences redirected lessons. The Feminist and Indigenous Experience Tour documents physics students' adverse experiences relating to identity; presents theoretical approaches to feminist and indigenous student experience, including feminist standpoint theories and indigenous understanding of “place;” and reports on feminist and indigenous perspectives introduced into classrooms, such as investigating home experiences and using African conflict mediation. This landscape is subjective, with its routes viewed differently by each student. We encourage you to review your own landscape, explore new paths within it, and introduce water features and context wherever you may be.