United States

This session features three early career scholars whose work centers queerness and queer theory in the context of STEM higher education.

PERC SM 22

Queerness in STEM education: perspectives from early career scholars

PERC 2022 is focused on "queering physics education" through an intersectional lens. By "queering," we are centering queer theory which breaks down social constructions and hierarchies to unpack normalized assumptions. In the context of physics education, we want to apply the theory to unpack who has power in physics to control the production of future physicists, how physics policies and practices are sometimes built on ideas of punishment and power, and how PER embeds binaries in both its content and sociological research. Further, we want to encourage a dialogue that is both a critique and an imagining of a queer future for PER.

Explicit attention will be given to constructions of race, (dis)ability, gender, sexuality and how they interact and impact lived experiences.

We have had such a fun time organizing this year’s PERC. You might be aware that we were committed to transparency and documenting our processes and decision making which we outlined here. This year has also been challenging to be a queer or otherwise marginalized person in the US. And we continue to seek and provide support for those individuals.

As such, we recommend that folks visiting Grand Rapids who have the means consider giving to some local organizations who are working to advocate for those impacted by historic and ongoing marginalization and violence.


PERC 2022 focused on "queering physics education" through an intersectional lens. By "queering," we centered queer theory which breaks down social constructions and hierarchies to unpack normalized assumptions. In the context of physics education, we apply the theory to unpack who has power in physics to control the production of future physicists, how physics policies and practices are sometimes built on ideas of punishment and power, and how PER embeds binaries in both its content and sociological research. Further, we wanted to encourage a dialogue that is both a critique and an imagining of a queer future for PER. Explicit attention was given to constructions of race, (dis)ability, gender, sexuality and how they interact and impact lived experiences.

technical paper

When we think about queer as a verb, adjective, and a noun, some things become clearer (and queerer!) while also making other issues more complicated a murky. This talk examines the idea of queering various components of our knowledge, scholarship, and pedagogy, inviting attendees to explore what we think we know, and then removing many of the (potentially biased) assumptions that undergird this knowledge to more deeply explore the world. Using queer theory, transdisciplinary approaches, and self reflection, this talk offers little in the way of answers, but rather, opens up a host of new avenues of approaches to thinking about education and knowledge.

Quarks are a bit queer: Rethinking known truths from a queer mindset

Research centering queer and trans* (QT) physics students has shed light on how undergraduate physics reinforces misogyny and cisheteronormativity, with emerging work on intersectionality capturing racialized dimensions for QT students of color. Introductory physics courses, as gatekeepers to STEM majors, have been important contexts in PER for exploring issues of equity, but QT students' experiences in these racialized and gendered spaces have not been considered. Positing a future direction for PER to advance queer and intersectional justice, this paper presents findings from an analysis that interrogates how introductory physics reinforces white cisheteropatriarchy in STEM experiences among QT students of color.

"We can’t just turn that off and then do some physics”: A counter-storytelling analysis of introductory physics as a white, cisheteropatriarchal space

In this plenary, we model a physics lesson exploring wave and particle properties of light. This teaching exposition exemplifies how queer theory can guide instruction that de-stabilizes binaries, absolutes, and power inequalities within both physics content and classroom social dynamics to promote inclusive, identity-affirming opportunities to learn. Concurrent with the lesson, we narrate our pedagogical reasoning, including how physics education research and queer theory informed the lesson design, as well as how we negotiated constraints (e.g., limited race and gender diversity in physics resources). We conclude by illustrating how instruction in our lesson makes space for complex understandings of science, which expand educational opportunities that affirm queer and trans* students' diverse and dynamic social realities as physics learners.

Leveraging queer epistemic subjectivity to advance justice through physics teaching

The need for physicists to work with others outside of the discipline of physics has become more prominent due to the growing necessity of interdisciplinary subjects and careers. While this need exists, there are few opportunities for physics students to gain collaborative experiences and skills. This study looks at how a community of practice formed within an informal physics program that was designed specifically to bring undergraduate physics and graphic design students together to create an aesthetic physics teaching tool. Throughout this 10 week summer project, we collected qualitative data in the form of interviews and written responses from a team of four undergraduate students, observed meetings, and interviewed the project co-developers. These data record the students' and co-developers' experiences as they work together to develop a public engagement project aimed at combining physics with art and design. Using an operationalized Communities of Practice framework to analyze these data, we are able to explore the formation of a Community of Practice and better understand how developing informal physics programs can foster a community of practice environment.

Examining community of practice formation within a new informal art and physics program

Mid-Study Update from an Online Design-Your-Own Labortory Experiment Curriculum

The physics teachers require, in addition to knowledge of the discipline, to develop skills that allow them to plan and implement teaching strategies that help students acquire knowledge of the different branches of physics and their usefulness in different contexts. Thus, teacher training plays a fundamental role and can be approached from two perspectives: initial training (profile) and in-service training (teacher training). In Latin America, particularly in Chile and Mexico, the training of physics teachers focuses on their professional profile, so it is necessary to deepen teacher training, so that an ideal profile is achieved to teach physics classes. In general, the teaching training of teachers can again be divided into two: 1) courses on the didactics of physics; and 2) Courses on the educational model of the school. In this work, a study is made about the training of the physics teacher, creating indicators to know the ideal profile of the teacher and proposing training tools that allow the teacher to approach the ideal profile, making a comparison of the results of the study between teachers of Chile and Mexico.

Professional profiles and teacher training of Physics teachers in Latin America

Conceptual inquiry-based introductory physics labs deploy PER-informed pedagogical strategies in physics labs with the aim of helping to improve students' understanding of physics concepts. Unlike traditional labs (which tend to be highly-structured and focus on verification of scientific relationships via precision measurements) and skills-based labs (which tend to eschew the aim of helping students learn physics concepts in favor of teaching experimental skills), some studies have suggested that conceptual inquiry-based labs may have a positive impact on student conceptual understanding, as measured by concept inventories. This paper reports on a randomized controlled study that compares student conceptual gains in electricity and magnetism between a conceptual inquiry-based lab and a skills-based lab. Following a difference-in-differences analytical strategy and hierarchical linear modeling, the result from this study is that the conceptual inquiry-based lab provides no additional benefit to students' conceptual learning gains compared with the skills-based lab. Studies such as these may help physics departments make decisions about the goals and scope of transformations to their introductory lab courses.

Measuring the impact of conceptual inquiry-based labs

How do we engage students with the skills of doing physics? Many reforms have been devised over the years, and one that ties many of these threads together is the framework of Three-Dimensional Learning (3DL). This framework provides a tools for aligning teaching around the 3 Dimensions of how scientists organize their disciplinary understanding. Implementing 3DL focuses on strengthening 'what' we teach, as opposed to active learning techniques that focus on 'how' we teach. Nevertheless, they create learning environments that are meaningfully active and allow students to put their knowledge to use. In this talk, I will present results from exam assessment items and in-class instructional segments, collected over 4 years from introductory courses. Our results indicate that using 3DL-aligned instruction to focus on what is taught is not only productive for student learning, but also offers opportunities for making classrooms active. We also find that Scientific Practices – the dimension encompassing the activities that scientists engage in – stand out amongst the 3 Dimensions: focusing on them leads to the most success in achieving 3 Dimensionality. This makes Scientific Practices the key to creating meaningfully active learning environments where students can put their knowledge to use and learn physics in scientifically authentic ways.

Creating Learning Environments Where Students Can Put their Knowledge to Use

Instructors new to active learning classrooms frequently ask how they should best structure groups in the classroom to ensure optimum learning. Groups within classrooms are complex social systems with many variables, so unfortunately there is no easy answer. Existing group-formation algorithms do not specify how groups should be structured; they only provide a way for instructors to specify their own algorithm based on factors like GPA or Gender. There are many dimensions of student thinking, motivation, and experience that may be relevant, but here we focus on one measurement that is relatively easy to measure: prior preparation. There have been some studies investigating the role of preparation in cooperative grouping, but each study seems to come to a different conclusion. Here we provide some evidence as to why that might be the case by investigating outcomes based on different measures of preparation and investigating the effects of cooperative grouping for different groups of students. We find that groups that are heterogeneous with respect to physics preparation tend to perform better. Additionally, we find that this effect is particularly pronounced for women and underrepresented students, but not for white men. This would seem to suggest that a reason for disagreements in the literature could be sensitive to how preparation is measured as well as the demographics of the study population.

Investigating the role of student preparation on cooperative grouping in an active learning classroom

In this study, we adapted a prior identity framework to investigate how students' perception of the inclusiveness of the learning environment (including sense of belonging, peer interaction and perceived recognition) in an introductory physics course predicts their course grades and physics motivational beliefs (including self-efficacy, interest and identity) at the end of this course. We found signatures of inequitable and non-inclusive learning environment in that female students' mean scores for sense of belonging, peer interaction and perceived recognition were all lower than male students' in the course. In addition, we found that female students had lower average course grades than male students. Using structural equation modeling, we found that students' perception of the inclusiveness of the learning environment predicts their self-efficacy, interest, identity and grades at the end of the course. In particular, students' perceived recognition, e.g., by instructors and teaching assistants, played a major role in predicting students' physics identity, and students' sense of belonging in physics played an important role in explaining the change in students' physics self-efficacy. Our findings can be helpful for creating an inclusive and equitable learning environment in which all students can excel.

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Queerness in STEM education: perspectives from early career scholars

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