Brasil Final Report - Department of Physics - The Ohio State University

104
COMMENTS AT THE FINAL SESSION OF THE VII IACPE
Marco Antonio Moreira
Instituto de Física, UFRGS
91501-970 Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil
moreira@if.ufrgs.br
At the close of this VII Interamerican Conference on Physics Education I would like to
use this last opportunity to express my deep concerns with the present state of physics education,
and with the preparation of physics majors and physics teachers, in many of our countries.
Regarding physics education, I am specially worried about what is happening at secondary
school level. Within a few months we will enter the 21st century whereas the physics taught in our
secondary schools usually does not go beyond the 19th century. Within a short period of time there
will be a one century gap between contemporary physics and the physics we teach to our students.
Besides teaching a chalk and blackboard physics, full of formulae and of problems which are not
much more than rote exercises, we teach an "old physics", not aiming at citizenship and with little
use of new technologies.
The secondary school physics curriculum must be updated, urgently, in at least three
aspects: 1) the incorporation of modern and contemporary physics topics; 2) the taking into account
that the vast majority of secondary school students are not going to be physicists; 3) the effective
use of new technologies as teaching and learning aids.
We have to dismiss arguments such as the one that assumes it is not possible to teach
modern and contemporary physics topics because students are not prepared or because these topics
are too abstract (abstract is the always taught mechanics) and we have to find ways of inserting such
topics into the secondary school curriculum leaving aside, of course, some classical topics.
Examples that this is possible might be found in papers presented in this meeting and in the
workshops on laser applications and on the use of charts and materials from the Contemporary
Physics Education Project. Obviously, this implies teacher preparation, a subject I will comment
later on.
It is also necessary to teach physics with a different approach, presenting it as a way of
modelling nature, as a live science useful for citizenship in contemporary society, abandonning,
definetely, the old habit of teaching it as if all students were undergoing scientific. Scientific
education is one thing, scientific training is a different one.
We must also change our instructional strategies as a consequence of the availability of
new technologies, recognizing that today's world is not just the old world plus the new technologies,
it's a new world. Thus, teaching today must be thought not as the old teaching plus the new
technologies, but rather as a new teaching. Of course, I am not talking about just using the most
fashionable softwares, or of just making old texts, and the ubiquitous lists of problems, available in
the internet, but rather about teaching in a different way.
No doubt, these three points are three big challenges for secondary school physics:
contemporary physics, physics for citzenship, and physics teaching with new technologies.
Regarding the preparation of physics majors and physics teachers, my concerns have to do