Meeting of the International
Commission on Physics Education (2006)
Minutes
Present: Pratibha Jolly
(Chair), Mauricio Pietrocola (Vice Chair), Dean
Zollman (Secretary), Diane Grayson, Hiroshi Kawatsu, Xingkai Luo, Elena Sassi, Hans-Joachim Schlichting, Vivien Talisayon,
Ian Johnston, Takatoshi Murata, Tae Ryun, Hyodom Toshio, Lakshman Dissanayake (August 17 only), Junehee
Yoo (representing Sung-Muk
Lee).
REPORTS ON CONFERENCES AND OTHER EVENTS
“World Conference on Physics & Sustainable
Development,”
9th Inter-American Conference on Physics
Education
“Toward Development of Physics for All”
IUPAP Meeting of Executive Council and Commission
Chairs
“Building Careers with Physics”
“Frontiers of Physics Education”
International Conference on Physics Education in
Brazil, 2008 (Pietrocola)
Strategies for Increased Participation of School
Teachers in Physics Education Meetings
Information about physics teacher education
degree programs at various universities around the world
Publications on physics education research
Proposal for a Latin American Physics Education
Network - LAPEN
ICPE BOOKS – REPORTS AND UPDATES
“Connecting Research in Physics Education with
Teacher Education”
ATTACHMENT A;
IX Interamerican Conference of Physics Education San José, Costa Rica 2006/07/03-07/07
ATTACHMENT B:
Temporary Report on International Conference on Physics Education 2006
Tokyo
ATTACHMENT C:
E-mail to Khalid Berrada Concerning the Conference in Marrakech
ATTACHMENT D:
ICPE Web site Statistics
ATTACHMENT E: Latin- American Physics Education
Network (LAPEN)
Pratibha
Jolly opened the meeting, welcomed and introduced Commission members, associate
members and guests.
Minutes of
the 2005 meeting in
The agenda
for this meeting was unanimously approved.
“World
Conference on Physics & Sustainable Development,”
October 31
– November 2, 2005 Durban, South
Africa Attended by Lakshman
Dissanayake, Diane Grayson, Pratibha
Jolly, Mauricio
Pietrocola & Dean Zollman
Mauricio presented a plenary talk on teacher education.
The
conference was summarized in the most recent newsletter. One outcome was a set of four
recommendations. (See p. 3 of newsletter.) This conference was considered a flagship
event of World year of Physics.
The Physics
Education stream was the most popular. A result of the conference was the
creation of workshops involving the Active Learning in Optics and Photonics
(ALOP) program. A workshop was held in
The recent
The working
group on teacher educator has been organized geographically into three
subgroups --
The Mobile
Physics project is moving forward as well.
Dianne suggested
that we need to identify Web site, possibly ICTP that would contains
the follow-up activities. It would be
good to have and "open source” format.
It was suggested that we need to decide if we want ICTP to host and then
approach them. Several people suggested that we cannot ask ICTP until we have a
better understanding of what we have and what we want. The minimum would be links. The group asked
that Elena, Pratibha and Dean ask the ICTP Director
what he needs lo make decision.
Mauricio reported that 150 participants from 13 countries
attended. The participants were mostly
teacher educators or physics education researchers. Discussions revealed similar problems in many
countries. Some effort is being made to
share teacher education materials.
Next
conference will be in
Takatoshi
Murata provided a written document which is included here as Attachment B. The attendance was much large than
expected. Participants offered 160
posters. A problem arose when many of
the poster presenters wanted to use computers.
This would have created an electrical overload; presenters needed to use
batteries.
The
Commission offered its formal thank you to the organizers of the conference.
24-25
February, 2006,
This
session was, in part, a new chairs orientation. The chairs of ICPE & C13
are now both on the Executive Council.
(C13 is Physics and Development.)
There may be an opportunity to link up with C13 in bigger way. Other commissions also might be interested
having ICPE represented on their commissions.
The overall impression is that there seems to be lot of interest in our
work. The next Council meetings will be
in
The details
of the General Assembly in
This
conference will be the first ICPE conference in
The Commission discussed the content of the
conference. Overall, members thought
that the topics to be covered were appropriate and would provide a broad view
of physics as a career. Commission
members requested an increase in two areas:
women in physics and the explicit involvement or students in the
conference. Increasing the number of
women in physics is a major goal of IUPAP.
Thus, we should be sure that each of our conferences addresses that
issue explicitly. How ICPE directly
addresses students was a question raised at the General Assembly. Dean offered to write a letter to the
conference organizers and request a specific session on Women and girls in
physics and urge the organizers include student participation. In the discussion of the budget (see below),
an issue concerning travel costs of the Commissioners was raised. Encouraging the organizers to consider
Commissioners as plenary speakers was added to the letter. The e-mail that was sent to Khalid Berrada
is included as Attachment C.
European
Physics Education Conference jointly meeting with GIREP, Rijeka/Opatija,
A primary
effort of EPEC is to bring together physicists and physics educators. The Commission unanimously approved
forwarding the request for €4,000 to the Council. We noted that our last request to support a
GIREP conference was denied by the Council.
We need to emphasize the international nature of GIREP and EPEC. We will asked GIREP
officers for statistics.
Mauricio stated that he is considering a conference in San Paolo for
2008. The topic would be “Physics
Education and Teaching Physics for Understanding.”
He believes
that the local support seems good and that it could draw significant
participation from
The
Commission had previously invited Mauricio to plan a conference for 2007. The time has been postponed for one year, but
the Commission agreed unanimously that it still supported this conference and
that the invitation is still valid.
As a follow
up to WCPSD Dean, Elena and Pratibha are discussing a
possible working conference on teaching physics with inexpensive
equipment. The conference would be held
in 2008 in
Gernot
Born wants to have a conference in Duisburg/Essen in 2009. The Commission encouraged him to move forward
with planning.
Vivien Talisayon submitted her last financial report. She received the thanks of the Commission for
long and excellent service.
Pratibha
suggested that we create a database of recipients of the news letter.
Elena noted that the present distribution
method of forwarding newsletters may lead to people getting multiple copies of
newsletter.
Ian noted
that he does not have University resources.
Thus, all costs must be covered.
Maintaining a database is expensive.
Pratibha thought that she can maintain such a
database in
Ian
proposed that the newsletter stay at 12 pages, with about ½of the content being
reports of conferences, related groups, etc. and the rest, articles about
physics teaching. He requested that Commission members be on the lookout for
articles that would be appropriate.
See Attachment D for
statistics.
It was
suggested that we register www.icpe.org
or some equivalent domain name. This
would save changing the web address every six years as the commission
changes. (Note after the meeting. Dean checked domains names and found that all
variations of icpe.xxx where xxx in not associated
with an individual country have already been registered. We will need to be more creative in a domain
name. For example the following are
available: goicpe.org, icpeweb.org and
webicpe.org.)
Pietrocola
[Chair], Zollman, Schlichting, Dissanayake
Strategies
for Increasing Participation
Mauricio
reported that a session for high school teachers was held as part of the
For leaders
of future meeting we need to write some suggestions to be put on the Website.
A good
session is to exchange ideas on what it is like to be a teacher in each
country. The working group will try to
get teachers to
One
difficulty is raising money. Elena noted
that at EPEC each National Physical Society was asked to support one teacher
and one young researcher,
Mauricio
stated that he had some funds to support teachers at the
Vivian
stated that the problem is not getting high school teachers but attracting
research physicists to ICPE conferences, she suggested that we should
distribute announcements to all Commissions
Talisayon
[Chair], Alarcon, Luo, Pietrocola
Vivien
presented a plenary talk at the meeting.
The contents of that talk and its publication in the proceedings will
represent a full report of the working group’s activities. She is willing to continue collecting and
disseminating the information. The general feeling of the Commission is that
this work should continue.
Jolly
[Chair], Talisayon, Zollman
No progress
to report. Elena noted that if something
is produced soon. it could be part of the book on “Connecting
Research in Physics Education with Teacher Education”
Dianne
reminded us that ICTP has a program to make journal articles available to scientists
in developing countries. A teacher can send e-mail to ICTP; then the article
returned by e-mail.
Proposal
for a Latin American Physics Education Network - LAPEN
Mauricio
relayed a request that Latin American Physics Education Network would like to
be linked to ICPE. See Attachment
E. LAPEN is planning an ALOP
workshop for next year. It will be LAPEN’s first activity.
LAPEN representatives are also discussing with
The
following motion was moved by Dean Zollman and seconded by Dianne Grayson. ICPE encourages LAPEN to take the lead in
physics education in Latin American and requests that the President of LAPEN
make regular reports to the Commission meetings. It passed unanimously.
Lakshman
reported that last week ASPEN sponsored 3-day workshop with
35-participants. The next General
Assembly will be held in either
Lakshman
agreed to work with Ian so that news about
Some folks
at the IUPAP General Assembly felt that IPCE should be doing more for
students. Sessions at meeting that are
specially aimed at schools students would be useful.
IUPAP has a
working group on women in physics. All
of our future meetings should include a focus on attracting girls to
physics. The general feeling of the
Commission was that we should inform conference organizers to have specific
sessions on issues of attracting and retaining girls and women to physics. These sessions should include information on
curricula and difference in treatment of males and females in physics teaching
and related activities.
We decided
that we would continue to discuss the Young Scientist Award that has been
approved by IUPAP. I promised to prepare
a short summary of the issues involved and distribute them to a subcommittee of
Dianne Grayson, Mauricio Pietrocola, and , Luo Xingkai. The task of
the subcommittee is to make sure that I stated the issues well and to add any
other necessary comments. After I hear
from the subcommittee, I will distribute the revised issues document to all of
ICPE.
I had promised
to get this note to you by 1 September. Unfortunately, GIREP seems to have
erased my memory. I just remembered last
night.
Please
remember that Pratibha needs to tell the IUPAP
Council something when it meets in the middle of October.
Please respond
to me with your comments by next Monday, 18 September.
Issues:
One of the
primary concerns is the difference between the type of efforts that ICPE
attempts to encourage in the physics community and those of most of the other
Commissions. Most Commissions focus on a
relatively narrow area of physics. They
can easily concentrate on research in a specific field. In our case we are attempting to foster high
quality research in physics education and equally high quality teaching of
physics at all academic levels. Thus,
the question arises whether we should be offering an academic award for
teaching, a professional award for research, or both.
During our
discussions commission members expressed no clear view that the award should be
only an academic one or only a professional one. Some members seemed to think that we should
offer both, perhaps alternating between professional and academic. However, each has some issues related to it.
Good
teaching is difficult to judge in many situations and particularly difficult to
judge when one needs to compare teachers across cultures. Further, in some countries or cultures the
type of innovative teaching that many of us advocate is difficult and may be
impossible for young teachers. Fro
example, in many places the government controls curriculum. Young teachers are
not likely to break away from the curriculum.
The control can sometimes be strict and old fashioned, but teachers can
be punished for being innovative. Thus, many
parts of the world could be eliminated from consideration.
Another
issue is simply the selection of a single teacher from the entire world. To be fair we would need to broadly solicit
nominations. Then we would have a major
task selecting a final group of candidates.
Because teaching – good or bad – is context dependent, we would need to
establish some standards that could apply broadly but yet be specific enough to
enable us to make some choices.
Defining good teaching is difficult at the local level and seems
overwhelming when considering many countries and cultures.
At the
University level many young faculty would be left out because they need to
concentrate on stabling their research program.
Only when research is firmly established (usually after 8-10 years) do
they have time to focus on teaching.
For a
professional award, some of the criteria seem to be a little clearer. In this case research in physics education
has some standards although these are not clearly stated anywhere. For an award of this nature we would need to
establish some measurable and observable characteristics which would lead us to
conclude that the young person was truly outstanding.
Some
members expressed a desire to reward professional leadership. However, this type of leadership seldom is
evident within 8 years of receiving a PhD.
In general,
those who had served on national selection committees for these types of awards
expressed some concern about the procedure.
It is very difficult to distinguish candidates all of whom are rather
good. So, the general approach is to
rely mostly on publication record.
A concern
about the nature of physics education research was also expressed. Unlike other areas of physics a young
researcher is not likely to have a single break through which will quickly
change the way a large number of people look at teaching. Because of the context dependence and the
general nature of teaching, changes move slowly through the community and must
be verified in many different situation before they can be generalized. Thus, young researchers may well make
important contributions within the first 8 years, but the value of the effort
may not be known for many years later.
For both
academic and professional awards, we would need to establish criteria and
standards. Ian Johnston suggested that
we complete a concrete exercise as a first step toward this definition. Each of us could select someone who is
deserving of the award and distribute his/her CV. We could abstract the criteria from those
CVs.
We also had
some discussion about defining “young.”
However, the IUPAP criterion is up to 8 years beyond earning a PhD.
A point of
general agreement is that the IUPAP statement that time for “maternity leave”
should not be included in the 8 years is good.
However, it is too narrow. We
would hope that some of our cultures will enable young men to take family leave
as well as young women.
Several
alternatives to the Young Scientist Awards were mentioned. At this time we would need to ask IUPAP for
permission to give such awards. We need
first to respond to IUPAP about the Young Scientist Award before pursuing other
options.
“Connecting
Research in Physics Education with Teacher Education”
At the
meeting we discussed the status of the chapters and made suggestions for
possible authors. Subsequently Elena
contacted several of the authors and received commitments from them. Below is the Table of Contents taken from her
12 September e-mail.
I think that it is not necessary to record all of our suggestions here.
Connecting Research in Physics Education with Teachers
Education"
draft of table of contents (updated, September 2006)
Section A Introduction (reasons for Vol. 2 and relations with Vol. 1)
(Matilde + Elena)
Section B About Physics
B1 The structure of physics Knowledge (Jon Ogborn,
completed)
B2 The Language of Physics (specific attention to Mathematics) (M.
Pietrocola)
B3 Physics in an interdisciplinary framework (S. Pak)
B4 Physics, technology, environment and development (D. Gil Perez, in
progress)
Section C About learning (or Physics Learning)
C1 Update on learning model and conceptual understanding (L. Viennot,
contacted)
C2 The development of skills and values (V. Talysayon)
C3 The image of science of students and teachers
C4 Learning form International Competitions (G. Tibell)
Section D About Teaching (or Physics Teaching)
D1 Communications skills for teaching (A. M. Pessoa,
contacted)
D2 History of Physics as a tool for teaching (I. Galili)
D3 What physics should we teach?
D4 Pedagogical content knowledge versus content knowledge (D. Grayson)
Section E Technologies for learning and teaching
E1 The aims and strategies of laboratory work
E2 The didactical uses of ICT- based approaches and tools (R. Thornton)
Section F Commented Bibliography
Pratibha
reported that funds are available to meet every year. Our budget is very high compared to other
commissions. We have a rolling budget of
$3000 over a 3-year period. However, we
have received $4000 in past two years.
Judy Franz provided $2000 for this meeting. $3000 is budgeted for news letter.
Elena noted
that the cost of travel to Commission meetings is very expensive. She asked it
the conference organization could help by providing some funds. Mauricio suggested that sometime national
councils, such as the British Council; may provide funds: Elena asked that we just
remind the local organizers. Diane
suggested that Commission members could be plenary speakers.
Elena
suggested that we write a letter to organizers of future conferences about
specific sessions related to gender issues.
Dean agreed to write a letter and include both gender issues and
participation of students.
Pratibha
reiterated that IUPAP treats us well
We maintain
close contacts with UNESCO. Several of our members are involved in
dissemination of the UNESCO produced ALOP materials. Minella Alarcon works closely with ICPE on a variety of common
interests.
Elena is a
member Education Division of the European Physical Society which will be meeting
next week-at GIREP. However, the
Education Division has no money
Pratibha
suggested that we seek endorsement of scientific bodies.
We need to increase ties with the Arabian Physics Education Network (