Irving and Sayre reply: We agree with many of the points raised by Erin De Pree and Joshua Grossman. Our Physics Today article is not a treatise on identity in physics; instead, it is a succinct summation of two studies aimed at applying the theory of communities of practice to a specific physics context, which is not De Pree and Grossman’s context. Nonetheless, many of their criticisms seem to stem from their misunderstanding the aims and methods of phenomenography.
For example, our statement that gender or race did not play a role in students’ perceptions of their experiences was not an assertion that those things aren’t important in students’ identity as physicists. Our statement is based on our data, in which students did not highlight gender as playing an important role in how they perceived being a physicist. That perception is what phenomenography seeks to find. Is it problematic that students don’t think of race or gender issues in physics? Absolutely! However, a critical examination of race and gender in undergraduate physics is a different study.
Similarly, De Pree and Grossman are concerned about our Physics Today article’s characterization of students by their attitude toward research. They’re right that most physics students don’t enter academic research careers, though that’s not the only utility of research experiences. That theme in students’ perceptions emerged from our data. We interpret it as a result of faculty messaging about the importance of research coupled to students’ lack of awareness about the diversity of physics careers available. Our data highlight students’ attitude toward research as a problem that needs to be addressed,1 not an accepted norm.
More broadly, De Pree and Grossman wish our study had been completed in a different context and a different way. There’s a huge body of literature on the experiences of introductory students but comparatively little on upper-division students. In our study, we’re interested in the experiences of upper-division students as they become physicists—whatever that means to them—not the experiences of first-year students as they become physics majors. We agree that the lens is narrow and limited by the demographics of physics majors at Kansas State University.
We’re not quite as limited as De Pree and Grossman allege, particularly in terms of student retention. Of our 20 participants, 18 were still enrolled as physics majors or minors at the time of the final interview, yet only 7 persisted in our study. Maintaining persistent engagement in an interview-based study is a common problem for longitudinal qualitative research. The final interview was not during the final semester of their undergraduate career, and that was another limitation of our study. We would have loved to follow students from matriculation to graduation—and beyond—but that level of research is not part of our current funding.
We welcome additional research on the difficult problem of how students become physicists across a wide variety of contexts and experiences.
