D02P01

Post date: Sep 27, 2016 5:32:5 AM

Enabling epistemological access to undergraduate physics: Implication for curriculum and pedagogy

Presenter

Honjiswa Conana is the Teaching and Learning Specialist in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Her role is to support teaching and learning initiatives in the Faculty. Prior to this appointment, she worked as an academic literacy practitioner in the Physics Department at UWC, working in collaboration with first and second year Physics lecturers. Her research interests are embedded in physics education and academic literacies. 

Her Doctoral research comprised of an in-depth study of students’ experiences of a curriculum that is explicitly designed to develop physics students’ academic literacy and their access to the disciplinary discourse of physics.

Abstract

In considering student access and success in higher education, Morrow (1993) introduces the concept of ‘epistemological access’. He distinguishes ‘epistemological access’ from ‘formal access’: formal access entails admitting students to the university and allowing them to study there, while epistemological access entails accessing disciplinary knowledge and norms. The concept of ‘epistemological access’ provides a useful framing for conceptualising introductory physics learning. 

From this perspective, the learning or studying of Physics is viewed not merely in terms of concepts to be understood, but also in terms of taking on new ways of thinking, which lead to important epistemic shifts. In this paper, I present close-up, qualitative research conducted in the context of a ‘reformed’ curriculum, explicitly designed to help students access the disciplinary discourse of physics and to begin to ‘think like a physicist’. The paper examines the extent to which this curriculum and its associated pedagogy make a difference to students’ approach to physics tasks in their introductory course.

The paper draws on theoretical tools from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) (Maton, 2009) – in particular the constructs of semantic gravity and semantic density – to characterise the pedagogical practices and student learning in this ‘reformed’ physics course. The LCT tools allow for the plotting of ‘semantic profiles’ that characterise the movement between the concrete and the abstract, as well as the use of semantically dense representations, not only in the pedagogical modes across this physics course, but also in students’ approaches to problem tasks. 

This paper will discuss how pedagogical practices in this course had an impact on the way that students approach physics problem tasks, as students grappled to approach physics tasks ‘like a physicist’.  Students in this ‘reformed’ course tended to adopt a greater modelling approach to their tasks, and use qualitative physics representations in ways that are more sophisticated. There were more frequent shifts in semantic gravity and semantic density.  Finally, the paper discusses the usefulness of the LCT tools for highlighting ways in which curriculum and pedagogy might make a difference in better supporting epistemological access to undergraduate science studies. 

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