Research on physics teaching and learning, physics teacher education, and physics culture at Uppsala University

Uppsala universitet, Fysikundervisningens didaktik Oslo 2017

Airey, John

This project compares the affordances and constraints for physics teachers’ professional identity building across four countries. The results of the study will be related to the potential consequences of this identity building for pupils’ science performance in school. The training of future physics teachers typically occurs across three environments, the physics department, the education department and school (during teaching practice). As they move through these three environments, trainees are in the process of building their professional identity. However, what is signalled as valuable for a future physics teacher differs considerably in different parts of the education. In educational research, professional identity has been used in a variety of ways (See for example overviews of the concept in Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009; and Beijaard, Meijer, & Verloop, 2004). In this project we draw on the work of Sfard and Pruzak (2005) who have defined identity as an analytical category for use in educational research. The project leverages this concept of identity as an analytical tool to understand how the value-systems present in teacher training environments and society as a whole potentially affect the future practice of trainee physics teachers. For identities to be recognized as professional they must fit into accepted discourses. Thus the project endeavours to identify discourse models that tacitly steer the professional identity formation of future physics teachers. Interviews will be carried out with trainee physics teachers and the various training staff that they meet during their education (physics lecturers, education lecturers, school mentors). It has been suggested that the perceived status of the teaching profession in society has a major bearing on the type of professional identity teachers can enact. Thus, in this project research interviews will be carried out in parallel across four countries with varying teacher status and PISA science scores: Sw
VR projekt 2015-01891

Physics teacher training; discourse models; comparative education; Other Physics Topics; Annan fysik; Didactics; Didaktik; Conference paper; info:eu-repo/semantics/conferenceObject; text

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