03. Curriculum Innovation
Paper
WITDHRAWN Contemporary Physics in the Science Curriculum
Victoria Millar, Maurizio Toscano
University of Melbourne, Australia
Presenting Author: Millar, Victoria;
Toscano, Maurizio
The science education literature in recent decades has included many and varied discussions about what should be included within the science curriculum (Fensham, 2022; Millar & Osborne, 1998). Often driven by concerns with decreased participation in science and the need for the science curriculum to remain relevant for students today and into the future, science curriculum discussions have proposed incorporating more relevant science, the nature of science, and shift in curriculum content from well-established consensus science towards more recent science discoveries (Dagher & Erduran, 2016; Hansson et al, 2019; Stuckey et al., 2013). Within this context, this paper takes up the discussion about greater inclusion of contemporary science ideas in the science curriculum with a focus on contemporary physics in the curriculum.
This paper will examine reasons for including contemporary physics in the physics curriculum alongside the tensions that arise from the historical and epistemological structure of physics as well as discourse about science curriculum change that hinder the introduction of contemporary physics. It does so through a critical examination of how the physics curriculum emerged, how current curriculum documents reveal convergent/divergent interpretations of physics curricula internationally, and how the incorporation of contemporary physics can be imagined and enacted.
Physics is considered a hierarchical discipline and subject (Bernstein, 1996). It aims to develop universal laws that form a common knowledge base and understanding upon which the discipline is built. Over time, physics has been shaped into a “coherent canon” (Simon, 2016, p. 394), which combined with its hierarchical nature, resulted in a curriculum premised on building knowledge over years of formal education via increasingly complex understandings of the same topics (Yates et al, 2016).
For these epistemological and historical reasons, modern and contemporary physics ideas are largely absent from the curriculum until late- secondary or university level education. In this paper, we will differentiate between modern and contemporary physics: contemporary physics is new and emerging physics research and issues, whereas as modern physics is physics developed largely in the 20th century. Modern physics topics such as special relativity and quantum physics are increasingly taught at the secondary school level and are already the subject of research about how they are taught and included in the curriculum (Treagust, 2022). The inclusion of contemporary physics pushes the boundaries of curriculum further by moving from newer yet firmly established physics ideas to emerging ideas in physics.
Arguments for including contemporary physics in the physics curriculum include providing students with access to cutting edge research that provides insight into the nature of how science is developed and fosters interest and motivation in these topics (Hansson et al., 2019). This paper will also explore how the introduction of contemporary science contributes to the aesthetics of physics education (Wickman, 2006; Girod, 2007; Toscano & Quay, 2021) and considers whether and in what ways aesthetic experiences in contemporary physics align or contrast with those of physics education.
This paper seeks to answer the following questions:
- What are the epistemological and historical arguments for the physics curriculum that have made it difficult to include contemporary physics?
- What are the aesthetic arguments for including contemporary physics in the curriculum?
- How can these epistemological, historical and aesthetic arguments for contemporary physics in the physics curriculum be reconciled?
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedTo consider the traditional structure of the physics discipline and curriculum, Basil Bernstein’s work on the ‘pedagogic device’ will be utilised. Bernstein (1990a, 1996) identified three hierarchical fields of the pedagogic device; the fields of production, recontextualisation and reproduction. This paper is concerned with the fields of production and recontextualization. It is in the field of knowledge production that new knowledge is produced. Within the field of recontextualisation, knowledge from the field of production is purposefully chosen and repositioned to become educational knowledge. This is where knowledge is selected from the disciplines and transformed into curriculum. The hierarchical structure of physics has led to the physics curriculum taking a similar structure but also resulted in it having changed little over many decades (Yates et al, 2016). This paper
This paper will draw upon recent developments and debates in the aesthetics of science to provide a conceptual and philosophical justification for the introduction of contemporary physics into mainstream education. In particular, it will expand upon recent proposals for phenomenological approaches to science education (e.g. Kersting et al., 2023; Kersting, Haglund, & Steier, 2021; Toscano and Quay, 2021) and combine these with the aesthetic theory of James McAllister (McAllister, 1996, 2002; Montano, 2013), which offers an historical and empirical account of the aesthetic basis for developments and revolutions in science. Taken together, these approaches offer both a robust way to distinguish between the aesthetics of contemporary and modern physics, but also show how such differences help justify the educational value of including emerging, unsettled or speculative science in school curricula.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsPhysics has long been regarded as a discipline that has a great deal of stability and unity around what knowledge is seen as legitimate in the curriculum (Bernstein, 1996). It is also a discipline that has faced a decline in student numbers and has been criticised for struggling to convey its broader utility value (Sharma et al, 2009). Yet alongside this, the discipline itself has drawn a lot of public attention through its contemporary science discoveries such as that of the Higgs Boson and gravitational waves.
This paper adds to the discussion of what should be included within the physics curriculum through an understanding of the epistemological and historical structures that have resulted in a physics curriculum that is difficult to change and through a discussion of how the inclusion of contemporary physics within the curriculum is beneficial for aesthetic reasons that have not been considered to date. It also demonstrates how the careful inclusion of contemporary physics is not at odds with the underlying epistemological structure of the discipline and instead has the possibility of benefitting students experience and learning in the subject.
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