United States

Conversations around the interactions of ethics, science, and society within STEM classrooms provide opportunities for students to practice large-scale ethical reasoning in the context of their future careers. We have designed and implemented curricular units which help instructors to scaffold these conversations in Texas State University STEM courses, including Modern Physics and Observational Astrophysics. We have collected and analyzed video data and written work in these course contexts. Our analysis has demonstrated that students’ scaffolded considerations of different stakeholder groups can build empathy and deepen their understanding of the broader context for ongoing ethical issues. We also see that students’ characterization of stakeholder groups’ motivations and identities can grow in complexity and nuance. In this talk, I will use classroom video and other artifacts to illustrate some examples we have identified where we see students building nuance and consider lessons for supporting students’ engagement with complex ethical issues in physics.

PERC SM 21

Building Nuance in Classroom Conversations about Ethics, Science, and Society

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society

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physics

ethics

Join AAPT and Physics Educators worldwide in developing and strengthening your professional connections by attending the 2021 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting. AAPT meetings are a great way to reflect on your teaching, recommit to best practices and re-energize your career with new research, products, and techniques.

Listen to internationally known plenary speakers, attend sessions, workshops, and special activities. Attending the virtual summer meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.

Please log in with your AAPT account or register for the event if you haven't already.

If you are registered please note that you need to be logged in with your AAPT email / credentials in order to get access.

AAPT SM 21

poster

**Making Physics More Inclusive and Eliminating Exclusionary Practices in Physics**

As a gateway discipline to STEM majors and careers, physics plays a central role in deciding who does, and who doesn't, get to discover and pursue scientific careers. Technical and scientific professionals are rewarded with economic privilege and status which affords them both social and cultural power. Therefore, social justice will be realized only when the opportunity, and the choice, to excel in physics is open to all students. The culture and practices of the physics classroom reflect the culture of physics at large, which raises the question of how our professional physics communities can embrace, rather than inadvertently repel, a diverse group of academics that can help improve physics culture.  To this end, the 2021 Physics Education Research Conference will focus on defining inclusive spaces and practices. Additionally, we will explore strategies for eliminating exclusionary practices in our classrooms, research spaces, and professional organizations. We call on the community to propose sessions that will drive conversations related to these initiatives throughout PERC 2021.

Please download the full program [here. ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TRMC_SYJ3PUqXyP7sskA7LRSA8ow0eRE/view?usp=sharing)

August 4, 2021 - August 5, 2021 in a Virtual Conference Format

Making Physics More Inclusive and Eliminating Exclusionary Practices in Physics

Race continues to play a major role in the experiences of students of color at predominantly white institutions. In this study we examine the experiences of six graduate STEM students of color using the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT), in order to understand their racialized experiences. CRT has deep roots in legal studies and was created for understanding and transforming the relationship between race, racism, and power, thus providing a theoretical framework for analyzing student responses. Our participants reported experiencing microaggressions and isolation while pursuing their graduate degrees. This article serves to highlight the voices of students of color while simultaneously raising awareness to issues of racism that student of color may face at predominantly white institutions.

Microaggressions and Isolation among Graduate STEM Students of Color

This research focuses on the experiences of three undergraduate women who are physics majors. Specifically we conducted semi-structured, empathetic interviews which reveal how uncomfortable physics environments inside and outside of the classroom exclude undergraduate women. The women give accounts of the behaviors of their male peers and instructors that influenced the physics culture. We use standpoint theory to focus on the experiences of undergraduate women to provide a holistic perspective of physics as well as identify key issues that these women faced in their undergraduate physics program and potential strategies to implement in the future to support undergraduate women in physics. Some of their suggestions include providing mentoring for women, training sessions, and establishing a code of conduct.

Negative impacts of an unwelcoming physics environment on undergraduate women

Self-efficacy has been shown to affect student engagement, learning, and persistence in various science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses and majors. Additionally, prior research has shown that women have lower self-efficacy than men in STEM courses in which women are outnumbered by men. This study examines the self-efficacy of men and women with similar performance in two consecutive algebra-based introductory physics courses in which women make up two-thirds of the students. These were mandatory courses at a large public university in the US taken primarily by bioscience majors, many of whom are interested in health professions. Our findings show a gender gap in self-efficacy disadvantaging women when controlling for course grade in both physics 1 and physics 2 both at the beginning and end of the course. Additionally, we find that most of the gender gap in self-efficacy is due to biased perceptions rather than performance in the courses.

Women have lower physics self-efficacy controlling for grade even in courses in which they outnumber men

In recent years, addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion in physics and astronomy has received growing attention. One key topic is how we can transform our classroom environments to generate welcoming, inclusive, and equitable spaces for all students. These environments are a major focus of physics students' experiences, involving a complex interplay of instruction, curricular activities, and social interactions. In physics- and astronomy-focused learning environments, previous efforts have aimed to address cultural issues through interventions or additional activities, such as by incorporating Indigenous beliefs and practices into astronomy content or by including modules that teach students about systemic bias and microaggressions. However, these efforts are limited by their lack of critical reflection, thus hindering students from practicing skills to problematize the systemic and cultural inequities. Additionally, these strategies can fail to comprehensively transform classroom environments and unintentionally silo these discussions. Here, I present an approach to astronomy education built on a foundation of culturally responsive asset-building, reflection, and connectedness. Students will learn astronomy content, such as about Solar System dynamics through physical modeling and simulations, as well as participate in discussions that problematize cultural norms and develop potential solutions. Students are guided to critically engage with astronomy, and they are empowered to become change agents for making astronomy a more equitable and just discipline. Finally, I explore how approaches like cultural responsiveness represent a potential avenue to truly reinvent and transform physics and astronomy education in a way that allows students to take ownership of their own teaching and learning.

Culturally Responsive Astronomy Education: Using a Critical Lens to Promote Equity and Social Justice

In interviews about land acknowledgements, high school physics teachers expressed a number of different ways they had engaged with Indigenous history after learning about and practicing land acknowledgements in a year-long professional learning community. These different ways included situating Indigenous displacement within sociopolitical inequities, connecting physics to historic and current exploitation of Indigenous lands and people, and identifying ways they could incorporate Indigenous history into their physics education curriculum. Throughout the interviews, teachers expressed how they had always viewed Indigenous history and physics as two separate schools of thoughts, but found through their engagement with Indigenous history that both seemed related. This also led to teachers’ engagement and advocacy in transforming schools to incorporate Indigenous land acknowledgements. Findings from our interviews highlight the importance and need for physics education research to be more inclusive of Indigenous voices and to bring to the forefront Indigenous histories, people, and perspectives. This will help start bridging the gap that continues to exclude Indigenous peoples and communities from the field of physics.

From land acknowledgments to action: highlighting the need to engage with Indigenous history in physics teaching

Of the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields, physics sees a dramatic underrepresentation and a lack of diversity due to systemic educational issues. Historically underrepresented people in physics (HUPiP) include women and racial minorities (specifically Black and Hispanic/Latinx ). Based on the American Institute of Physics TEAM-UP project and the American Physical Society Threatened Departments project, we decided to pursue a program to increase the number of HUPiP by starting locally in Philadelphia, a racially diverse community. By building relationships between Drexel Physics and physics teachers in Philadelphia schools, we hope to work with teachers to survey the paths students take to being a physicist. To this end, we interviewed Philadelphia physics teachers to get a better sense of their interests, needs, and attitudes toward recruiting students into physics. These interviews revealed that there is a need for improved personalized communication, a desire for HUPiP guest speakers in the classroom, clearer information on careers in physics, and highlighting specific school district difficulties surrounding high school physics education.

Recruiting Future Philly Physicists

This poster examines and proposes the use of language-teaching techniques in math and physics classes to reduce racial inequity and boost quality of math/physics education in k-12 schools. It outlines, current teaching methods and the negative consequences of excluding the linguistics of mathematics, demonstrates how mathematics will be conveyed as a symbolic language in the learning environment, covers the benefit of a language-based approach, and contrasts this new teaching method with the current teaching approach in math/physics classes. It concludes with the fun and engaging atmosphere created by adding the language-learning environment while enabling students to gain deeper understanding of the notoriously abstract concepts in these classes.

The Language of Mathematics and Its Relationship to Physics Teaching

The ongoing marginalization of underrepresented students in college physics programs is an issue that researchers in PER are still working to solve. Studies that look at some of the reasons for dropping or switching fields indicate that students struggle to feel connected to the physics community. In this study, we complete a systematic literature review of four major journals in PER on the effects of informal STEM programs on the facilitators. Preliminary results indicate that informal programs do positively affect physics identity and a sense of community. However, it is unclear if and how these benefits affect marginalized groups in physics.

Supporting marginalized students through informal STEM programs: a systematic literature review

Faculty and graduate students develop as education researchers through different avenues. One possible path is through their participation in the Professional development for Emerging Education Researchers (PEER) program, which is designed to develop participants' discipline-based education research through hands-on activities during a series of workshops. We collected data before and during participation in one of the editions of this program conducted entirely online with primarily physics and math faculty. This data allows us to examine in what ways engagement in the workshops affects participants' research ideas and their self-efficacy. In particular, we explore the ways in which participants' perception of their growth in the field evolves as they engage in this professional development program. This work will enable us to analyze the impact of this virtual professional development experience as well as gain a deeper understanding of different facets of emerging education researchers’ professional development.

Development of Physics and Math Faculty during Online Professional Development Experience

Student chapters of affinity-based, professional societies provide students from minoritized and marginalized groups with a number of benefits, including an opportunity to network with other students who share socio-demographic identities and disciplinary interests. When these programs provide summer bridging opportunities for students transitioning into college, it is especially helpful to first year students who might otherwise know few, if any, of their peers at the beginning of their collegiate journey. This may ease the transition to college for students who are underrepresented at the institution due to their sociocultural and sociopolitical identities. In particular, research suggests that peer relationships are important for first-generation college students and students identifying as African American or Hispanic/Latinx (Martin, 2015; AIP TEAM-UP, 2020). 

In our study, we investigated the relationship between participation in student chapters of affinity-based, professional societies and centrality in a classroom network. In our first data set, centrality is based on student interactions with their peers as reported by students in a survey administered at the end of the second semester of a two-semester sequence introductory physics course for engineering students. In the second data set - collected during a different academic year - centrality was based on student reports of which of their classmates they knew by name in the second week of the first semester of a two-semester sequence introductory physics course. We found that in both cases, students who participated in affinity-based professional societies had higher centrality measures. Additionally, we examined the relationship between centrality and course performance as determined by final course grade. Preliminary results will be presented.

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Building Nuance in Classroom Conversations about Ethics, Science, and Society

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