Physics-- Education

Interview with Eugenia Etkina, Distinguished Professor of Science Education in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. She laments the absence of pedagogical considerations in the approach most physicists take to teaching in their area of expertise, and she describes the opportunities to work with physicists to improve their teaching skills. Etkina talks about appreciating the culture of physics as an instrumental part of teaching the next generation to ensure advancement in discovery. She recounts her upbringing in Moscow where her father was a physicist and the social and educational constraints she experienced as a Jewish person. Etkina describes her education at Moscow State Pedagogical University and her interest in teaching physics, which she pursued at a prestigious high school in Moscow. She explains the origins of Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) and the benefits that Glasnost and Perestroika had on teachers in Russia. Etkina describes her dissertation research, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the opportunities that allowed for her emigration to the United States to join the faculty at Rutgers. She describes the adoption of the ISLE approach all over the world and she reflects on the role of science education in combatting science skepticism. At the end of the interview, Etkina reflects on the most important feedback mechanism to determine how to improve pedagogical approaches, and she shares her hope for ISLE to be adopted in every physics classroom.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Walter Massey, chairman of the board of the Giant Magellan Telescope organization. Massey describes his childhood in segregated Mississippi and his academic achievements that led to his admission to Morehouse College from the 10th grade. He describes his developing interest in physics during a formative summer program at Columbia, which convinced him that he could compete at high levels. Massey describes his graduate work at Washington University and how he came to be a student of Eugene Feenberg, who was working on correlated basis functions to many-body physics problems. He discusses his postdoctoral work at Argonne Laboratory and his interest in becoming involved in civil rights issues in the late 1960s, when he became a professor at the University of Illinois. Massey describes his subsequent tenure at Brown, where he focused on mixtures of helium-3 and helium 4 and on the problem of sound dispersion. He discusses the impact of an ACE fellowship which led to his work in the chancellor’s office at UC Santa Cruz, which in turn changed the course of his career trajectory toward policy. Massey describes his tenure at the University of Chicago, his directorship at Argonne, and how he worked through the existential challenge of nuclear energy following the Three Mile Island disaster. He explains his decision to accept an offer to head the National Science Foundation and how he grappled with creating a national science policy in a post-Cold War world. He discusses his work in support of the LIGO project and he explains his decision to lead Morehouse College after a brief appointment with the University of California. Massey reflects on his accomplishment at Morehouse, and he describes the ways the college had changed since his time there as a student. At the end of the interview, Massey discusses his work on the board of Bank of America and for the School of Art Institute of Chicago, and he discusses some of the ongoing challenges and areas of improvement to pursue in promoting diversity in the sciences. 

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Edward F. (Joe) Redish, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Maryland. Redish reflects on the symbiotic nature of his interest in nuclear theory and physics education, and he describes his long collaboration in the latter field of Lillian McDermott. He recounts his childhood on Long Island and his developing interests in math and science. Redish describes his undergraduate education at Princeton where he was mentored by John Wheeler in studying unified electromagnetic fields from a pedagogical perspective. He discusses getting to know Charles Misner at Princeton, and he explains his decision to go to MIT for graduate school, where he conducted his thesis research under the direction of Felix Villars on nuclear reactions using quantum field theory. Redish explains the opportunities leading to his postdoctoral appointment at the Center for Theoretical Physics at Maryland and ultimately his ability to join the faculty and achieve tenure in the physics department there, in recognition of his work in three-body clustering problems. He describes the lengthy intellectual process of switching over entirely to physics education research in the early 1980s and why teaching at a large public university proved to be the ideal pedagogical proving ground for his interests. Redish discusses his entrée to the world of AAPT and what he saw as some of the orthodoxies in the field that were ripe for change, including making the field more student-centric. He describes his current project, NEXUS/Physics, which is an introductory physics for life sciences class that he developed in partnership with biologists, and he explains how this fits with his personal research interests that have delved recently into the biological realm. Redish explains the difficulty in mentoring physics education graduate students because of the expectation of their mastery of both physics and pedagogy, and at the end of the interview, he describes the Resources Framework that he is building as akin to a grand unified theory of physics education.