Identity development in physics classes: from community of practice towards nexus of multi-membership

The thesis aims to contribute to the general problem of the impact of physics education on students’ identity development. Identity development has become more and more relevant in the last years and, according to OECD, it represents one of the main goals of education (OECD, 2018). In STEM education, the issue resonates with the lack of relevance that most of the students still perceive in learning science at school (physics and mathematics in particular) (Stuckey, Hofstein, Mamlok-Naaman, Eilks, 2013). Starting from this consideration, I carried out an analysis of the research literature to formulate the problem as a “research narrative” grounded on a selection of STEM literature theoretical constructs. The narrative is mainly centered around the idea of community of practice (Wenger, 1998), but is incorporates the constructs of Discourse & Affinity identity (J. Gee, 2000), Practice-linked identity (N. S. Nasir and Hand, 2008), epistemic agency (Stroupe, 2014), socio-scientific norms (Yackel and Cobb, 1996), boundary crossing mechanisms (Akkerman and Bakker, 2011; Wenger, 1998), and appropriation (Levrini, Fantini, Tasquier, Pecori & Levin, 2015)). The narrative has been tested in two empirical studies with physics students attending the course in Physics Education in Bologna. Aims of the studies were: i) to test students’ proximity of the problem and the effectiveness of its reformulation in the narrative (RQ1); ii) to collect suggestions, opinions, experiences to turn the narrative into an operational set of suggestions for teaching (RQ2). The results show a great feeling of proximity and effectiveness of the narrative to stimulate profound personal re-elaborations concerning the nexus between learning physics and personal identity. As for RQ2, initial insights have been collected and directions for further investigations have been pointed out

Enhancing relevance and authenticity in school science: design of two prototypical activities within the FEDORA project

We live in a historical period that sociologists call the “society of acceleration”, where changes, mainly triggered by science and technology, occur over increasingly shorter time intervals. International reports by the OECD, the European Commission, and UNESCO highlight a worrying detachment between scientific education at school and societal issues, in terms of topics and practices. To address this gap, the H2020 project FEDORA1 designed and implemented several school activities centered around topics related to current challenges, aimed to increase students’ feeling of relevance toward formal scientific education. These implementations are: (i) based on the three FEDORA framework’s theoretical pillars: interdisciplinarity, search for new languages, future-oriented education; (ii) informed by some FEDORA’s recommendations to curricula developers, then turned into operational design principles: cross and integrate different disciplines, elicit epistemic emotions, embrace and embed complexity and uncertainty, dismantle dichotomous thinking and telling, exercise scenario building and thinking about the future in a pluralistic way. After presenting the general framework and the recommendations, we will discuss the details of two activities (“Mocku for change,” “Physics of clouds”) which, respectively, exploit the use of creative writing and mockumentary as forms of new languages. They concern topics such as sustainability or complexity and are aimed to help students engage and make sense of contemporary challenges in a personal and emotional way. In the end, we will argue why we consider them to be examples of practical and (to some extent) reproducible activities in class, which could reduce the gap between science at school and science outside school; in this sense, we claim to shed light on possible ways by which formal educational systems can reposition themselves to deal with societal needs