The two of us (AR and LAE), in our teaching, research, and work with teachers, advocate for responsive teaching—an approach that seeks out and builds on the productive “seeds of science” in what our students say and do and assumes that “all students…are brilliant.” This pedagogical approach requires a commitment to listening to and intellectually empathizing with students’ scientific ideas.
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One may question the relevance of examples from elementary math and science to physics teaching and wonder why, instead, we did not choose an example from physics. Our response to this is twofold. First, though we looked, we could not find a single example in the literature that discusses how physics teachers have appreciated (or underappreciated) the cultured ways of talking students are bringing to bear in a physics classroom. This may not be surprising, retrospectively, since there has been so little access to physics for historically marginalized (or non-dominant) groups. Second, our own experience as physics teachers was deeply impacted by these examples from elementary school; as we show later in this article, the insights from Leona’s story—and then from the stories we share in the next section—helped us to see and appreciate examples from introductory physics. We anticipate that the same may be true for other physics teachers, and we share these examples in that spirit.
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To view the original video, contact the authors, or look for it in the Periscope collection in the future. Periscope is a collection of lessons for physics instructors, meant to support awareness and implementation of best practices in physics pedagogy: https://www.physport.org/periscope/.
27.
All names are pseudonyms.
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2017
American Association of Physics Teachers
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