New trends in physics teaching, v.4; The ... - unesdoc - Unesco

New Trends in Physics Teaching IV
‘Who would be brave enough to offer a course reduced far below the local or national norm
and to defend his action by claiming that his students were going to learn and understand more
physics because of the change?’ [ 21.
One special aspect of too much and too abstract material which is of no obvious importance is
the speed with which it is presented in the class room:
‘ . .. that a student’s incapacity in a particular subject is owing to a too-rapid passage from the
qualitative structure of the problem. .. to the quantitative or mathematical formulation normally
employed by the physicist’ [ 121 .
A. Arons, in a characteristic flash of caustic humour, characterized a common style of university
professors who teach future physics teachers (who then teach as they were taught) in these terms:
‘It is the basic premise of the vast majority of introductory physics courses taught at the present
time. . . that, if one takes a huge breadth of subject matter and passes it before the student at
sufficiently high velocity, the Lorentz contraction wil shorten it to a point at which it drops into
the hole which is the student’s mind’ [ 131. This points to one problem of teacher education
which seems to me to lie at the root of the matter.
Teacher education is not directed towards the teaching of children; it is not competency-based:
‘We feel that there is a huge gap between the abstract and theoretical lectures which teacher
trainees receive in the universities and the actual practical teaching which they must perform.
This gap is something which many, if not all, teacher trainees are unable to overcome’ [ 141 .
The Unesco Handbook for Science Teachers describes clearly the disastrous role of many of
the university teachers who teach future teachers: ‘The secondary teacher thinks of his or her
university instructors as models to emulate and therefore “teaching is telling and learning is
listening” in all too many science classrooms’ [ 151 . P.J. Kennedy, in his Outlook from Trieste
[4], took the point when he wrote ‘. . . having selected our teachers merely for their ability
to do physics and having spent so much time on training them to do physics, we then require
them to display an intimidating range of other qualities, skills and abilities, and ask them to
perform tasks widely different from, and perhaps even incompatible with, much of their training.’
Children play a subordinate part:
If teacher education is responsible for the negative development of physics education in the past,
then we must focus first on this if we wish to make improvements. But teacher education must
not be seen as an isolated, self sustaining, teacher-centred activity. It seems that the demands and
needs of children are not sufficiently taken into consideration in the daily practice of teacher
trainees. One indication of this is perhaps the fact that in a concluding paper on physics education
in the chapters ‘Problems and Challenges’ and ‘Suggestions for Action’, [9] the word ‘teacher’
appears fifty-eight times, whereas the words child and pupil are used four times only!
What is the way out of this dilemma? Answers to these questions cannot be given in the framework
of physics alone. In the process of teaching and learning physics, competence in physics and
in the basic concepts of other natural sciences is necessary but by no means sufficient for giving
adequate answers. Competence in the fields of the philosophy of education, pedagogics and
psychology and in human relationships are of enormous importance [ 161. The contribution of
these disciplines must not be seen in isolation but should be closely related and directed towards
physics and education. We, in Dortmund, are developing the education of our physics teachers
on the basis of a close collaboration between these different disciplines [ 171. The particular
items of our approach are strongly influenced by our underlying philosophy of education.
270