New pedagogy, old content
New pedagogy, old content
These new methods of learning, be they student centered, modeling, metacognitive, citizen science, whatever, are excellent methods, but they are not culturally responsive or really student-centered identity-wise for most students if they are means to learn the same old content from 1890 Harvard texts that was made for a select class in society to address a tiny portion of society's thought. To make things worse, rather than expanding, introductory physics content has contracted further in the last eighty years to a narrow, prescribed path intended for rocket science and particle physics, the pinnacles of post-WWII physics. This contraction and sequencing made Faraday physics, which gripped 19th century philosophy and remains interesting today, a mere afterthought of high school physics, something you might give a couple weeks out of the year if you can finish beating kids over the head with rocket science in time. Even for those classes that do get to it, It's so far into the introductory year that the decision has been made to hate physics—You recognize this action and see it over and over again every fall semester but don't see what to do.
There are two things to do, and they are deliciously dichotomous:
- Start to give Faraday and Maxwell their due as early as possible, say the first week of class.
- Actively find other ways of knowing about the physical world, ways developed outside a skinny rectangle drawn between Austria and the British Isles, as early as possible, say the first week of class.
