Teaching physics

Physics Education Research

Physics Education Research (PER) has been focused on improving results in students' performance in standard physics topics. Some PER has addressed gender inequity in performance. PER is meant to inform professional development and practice. File:Science Teaching as a Profession2.pdf

PER has not addressed the content of the curriculum, except in reaffirming (unintentionally?) the canon by studying how it can be taught better.

Gender and physics teaching

Indoctrination can be the result of the expectation that one is training youth to follow in one's footsteps.

Same canon, new context

Sometimes our quest is for a new context for the same concept, which is akin to showing how the same physics concepts appear in different "applications" or situations.

For example, see Dan MacIsaac's review of The Humanized Physics Project (HPP) website, http://physics.doane.edu/hpp/index.htm , in The Physics Teacher 48:9 (Dec 2010) p. 622 :

This website, created by a team of investigators led by Dr. Robert Fuller of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, con- tains a large collection of resources designed to help physics teachers use the human body as a context for teaching phys- ics, particularly at the introductory level. The site provides a library of many classroom-tested activities and labs, descrip- tions of revised introductory physics courses using the human body theme, the complete body-themed intro physics textbook called Fuller-cubed (with lab manual, study guide, and instructor’s guide), and video resources for sport event analysis with numeric anthropometric data. The Humanized Physics Project was partially supported by the National Science Foundation CCLI Program under grant DUE#00- 88712 and DUE#00-88780. This column editor particularly enjoyed the rich labs and the textbook examples; my students and I are always interested in learning more about the phys- ics underlying our own bodies. Submitted by Robert Fuller, University of Nebraska at Lincoln