Physics Education Research Conference 2012

August 1, 2012 - August 2, 2012 in Philadelphia, PA

Cultural perspectives on learners’ performance & identity in physics

As new research questions have emerged related to the variability of student reasoning and practices across contexts, the community has begun to attend to the relevance of culture and identity in physics learning.  In conducting this work, the PER community has begun to draw from fields such as social psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and sociology along with new methodologies associated with these fields.

In particular, these fields offer new ways of thinking about performance.  For example, achievement on various assessment instruments (such as FCI, problem-solving tasks, etc.) is a student performance that researchers and instructors commonly focus on. However, other student performances, such as how students talk and participate in ongoing classroom activities, can also offer valuable sources of evidence about understanding and development.  Often, careful consideration of these different performances suggests different accounts of student understanding that are in tension with each other (or seemingly incongruent).  Socio-cultural theoretical and methodological tools are useful in developing robust and coherent accounts of student understanding that span these different contexts.

The PER community has also begun to explore identity as a lens for understanding student development and participation in physics.  Students' past patterns of engagement with other communities may offer productive resources for engaging in disciplinary practices.  Similarly, students' engagement with other communities may also sit in tension with typical school science.  From a socio-cultural perspective, identity is constantly a work in progress and enacted with others in cultural activities. This perspective draws attention to the fact that the people and artifacts around you influence (and therefore are partially responsible for) your identity and the performance enacted. Examining and characterizing identity in these ways involves drawing on data beyond the individual and using methodological tools that can account for this broader scope.

One of our goals in this conference is to highlight these emerging research directions and draw attention to the theoretical tools and methodological considerations of cultural practice perspectives on learning and performance. This conference will bring in national experts from these fields as plenary speakers, exemplify how these perspectives shape the methods, claims, and analyses of learning environments, and work to foster integration of these theoretical and methodological perspectives into the work of the PER community.

Plenary speakers for 2012 are:
Megan Bang, University of Washington
Indigo Esmonde, University of Toronto
Kris D. Gutierrez, University of Colorado at Boulder
Reed Stevens, Northwestern University

The 2012 Organizing Committee is:
Jessica Watkins, Tufts University
Chandra Turpen, University of Maryland, College Park
Eleanor Sayre, Kansas State University
Ayush Gupta, University of Maryland, College Park

Registration Details

PERC 2012 Registration is available as a one day extension of the AAPT Summer 2012 Meeting.

Abstract submission is now open.

Deadlines to remember:
Contributed posters (paper eligible) and session proposals: June 1
Proceedings papers: July 6
Contributed posters (paper ineligible): July 13
Conference: August 1-2