
GIREP Seminar
2003
|

Among indications of a crisis in physics education is an impressively
low number of students who enroll to physics classes in high schools.
We consider this fact as informing educators regarding the necessity
of searching for the new relevant meanings of scientific contents,
physics curriculum to be delivered by teachers. The new meanings
of scientific knowledge reflect the new cultural environment in the
modern society. Our study suggested such a meaning with regard to
physics in comparison with the currently employed vision commonly
realized in introductory courses at high schools and universities.
We suggest that the professional training of physics teachers will
reveal to them a dialogue among physics discipline-cultures (each
representing a fundamental physics discipline, such as mechanics
and electrodynamics). In a discipline-culture, one can distinguish
three domains of knowledge elements: (1) the nucleus [central principles
and paradigms], (2) normal disciplinary knowledge [knowledge units
derived from the contents of the nucleus], and (3) peripheral knowledge
[theories, models etc. contradicting the contents of the nucleus].
It appears that physics, as a whole, cannot be arranged in a single
tripartite (triadic) structure (this presents a deconstruction of
the suggested approach), since, for example, classical mechanics
is incompatible with electrodynamics, for its being inherently relativistic.
Still, physics can be seen as a family of several discipline-cultures,
sharing concepts, formal tools, epistemology. Bound together by family
similarity, the disciple-cultures are in a conceptual discourse.
Thus, teaching physics as a culture will create a polyphonic space
for different worldviews. In this our perception, old physics theories
that are currently “non-relevant” for the discipline
and thus often dropped from the curriculum, become important for
instruction, as being inherent components of the material to be taught.
Implications of the tripartite structure were suggested.
|