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Call for questions for the PERC 20/20 Bridging session panelists

posted by Beth Cunningham, AAPT; Lin Ding, The Ohio State University; Alexis V. Knaub, AAPT; and Steve Maier, Northwestern Oklahoma State on Jul 6 1:56PM UTC
This year's PERC will be uniquely focused on communal reflections on the role of physics education research. To promote meaningful discourses about the history, current status and future projections of PER, we have invited a group of plenary panelists with diverse expertise in DBER and/or PER to join us in our Bridging Session (see https://www.per-central.org/conferences/2020/presenters.cfm for the introduction to our invited panelists). We believe candid and deep dialogues will take place when the entire community are actively engaged. To that end, we would like to crowdsource questions that you believe are pertinent to the theme of this year's PERC and are important to be asked of our panelists. We will collect and compile them into a list to be used for the Q&A component of our Bridging Session. You can submit your questions to perconference2020@gmail.com before July 14. There is no limit on the number of questions you can submit or the number of times you can submit. We also encourage you to invite your colleagues to submit their questions. After all, we want to make sure the community's voices are being heard and addressed. Login to reply

A Short History of How AAPT Started Doing a Land Acknowledgement at National Conferences in 2019

posted by Angela Little on Jun 18 4:43PM UTC
My name is Dr. Angie Little (Chinook Nation). I wanted to share a little bit about a positive experience of advocating for Indigenous causes within the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). There's some more detail that could be added to this account at some point, but here are the basics: In 2019, the AAPT leadership was asked by an AAPT member about whether the organization would consider making an Indigenous land acknowledgement at their next conference. The AAPT Committee on Diversity Chair at the time, Dr. David Marasco, was also contacted about the request. Dr. Marasco pulled Dr. Ximena Cid into the conversation, who explained to the leadership some of her thinking on best practices. Dr. Cid is a long time organizer for Chicanx/Latinx and Indigenous peoples in the physical sciences and is also a leader in the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) community. Dr. Cid looped me into the conversation as well, as I'd been doing some work to support the APS Committee on Minorities in supporting Indigenous-led causes. A Zoom meeting was eventually convened across the AAPT Executive Officer, President, President-Elect, and Vice President to discuss this idea. I was asked to join. I was pleasantly surprised that the Executive Officer had asked the leadership to read through a guide about best practices in land acknowledgements before the meeting convened (https://usdac.us/nativeland). This guide has a lot of helpful information and explains things like: “Acknowledgment by itself is a small gesture. It becomes meaningful when coupled with authentic relationships and informed action.” On the call, AAPT leadership agreed that, to support a meaningful land acknowledgement, they would provide funds to the Director of a Native American Studies program on a college campus nearby the conference location. These funds would be for the Director to use at their discretion: for their time to give the land acknowledgement, to support their own program, and/or toward another local Indigenous cause. Lastly, the AAPT leadership noted that they understood that the land acknowledgement was only a first step. They agreed that they would try to work toward more long-term relationship building with Indigenous groups such as the American Indian Society of Washington, D.C, since the AAPT headquarters is located nearby Washington, D.C. AAPT's 2019 Summer Meeting was in Provo, Utah. Dr. Franci Taylor, Executive Director of the American Indian Resource Center (AIRC) at University of Utah, was contacted and agreed to give the acknowledgement. The AAPT Program PDF included this description of the first land acknowledgement: ^{Image Description: This image comes from the AAPT program booklet, with the title, "Land Acknowledgement at Welcome Reception," and includes a brief description of the event (this text will appear at the bottom of this blog post). On the left is a black and white photo of Dr. Franci Taylor - she is a Choctaw woman with long dark hair, glasses, a sweater and turtle neck shirt, and a beaded necklace. To the right of the event description, there is also red circle. "YOU'RE ON INDIGENOUS LAND" is written in white inside of the circle. The word "Indigenous" is highlighted in white with red lettering.} The land acknowledgement discussion among AAPT leadership occurred in Spring of 2019 and by Summer of 2019, AAPT had followed through with having a land acknowledgement at their August 2019 meeting in Provo, Utah. I really appreciated Dr. Taylor's acknowledgement, which was preceded by some thoughtful context, history, and story-telling. As of Summer 2020, my understanding is that Dr. Beth Cunningham, AAPT's Executive Officer, has reached out to some D.C. area Native American leaders and is working toward longer-term relationship building. Text of the event description that appears in the image is reproduced in text form here: Franci Taylor, Executive Director of the American Indian Resource Center (AIRC) at University of Utah and a cross-cultural consultant for University Health Sciences. She will conduct a Land Acknowledgement at the beginning of the Welcome Reception on Sunday, July 21, 2019. This land acknowledgment recognizes the traditional territory of the Indigenous people who called the land home before the arrival of settlers, and in many cases still do call it home. Ms. Taylor earned a B.F.A. and a B.S. in Anthropology/Sociology at Montana State University. She earned her Ph.D. in American Indian Studies through the Faculty of Archaeology program at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. She has taught American Indian Studies and Culture for over 25 years locally, nationally, and internationally at all educational levels. She has worked on creating American Indian curriculum for public schools. Land Acknowledgment is a way to recognize that the land on which we hold this meeting has a very long history, reaching beyond the establishment of European colonies, as well as its significance for the Indigenous peoples who lived and continue to live upon this territory, and whose practices and spiritualities were tied to the land and continue to develop in relationship to the land and its other inhabitants today. Tags: history AAPT organizing Login to reply

Anti-Black racism in policing: what's it got to do with physics?

posted by Dimitri R. Dounas-Frazer, Western Washington University on May 30 11:01PM UTC
Content warning: anti-Black violence and death. Context Below, I share a slightly edited version of an essay I wrote last February for students enrolled in a class called Matter & Energy in Physical Systems. I wrote the essay for Black History Month as a way to hold myself accountable to my own self-education about Black history. I shared this and other essays with the students I was teaching as part of an overall strategy of incorporating the people and history of physics into formal undergraduate physics education. I’m posting this essay on the PERC 20/20 blog in response to the recent murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Tony McDade by current or former police officers. People across the nation mourn and organize publicly and privately. Meanwhile, the president of the United States has threatened to use the military to kill Black protestors, using a racist dog whistle and quoting a racist police chief in the process. This is a terrifying, dangerous, and heartbreaking time in the United States. Amidst the pain, fear, and heartache, it is important to remember that PER is interconnected with the realities of racism in policing. In this essay, I emphasize that interconnectedness by compiling writing done by individuals and groups in physics and astronomy. Anti-Black racism in policing The goal of this essay is to explore the impacts of anti-Black police practices on the physics and astronomy communities. As a first step, I think it will be useful to comment on the reality of ongoing and systemic anti-Black racism in policing. Anti-Blackness in policing is well-documented and has historical precedent. The US Department of Justice has recently reported on systemic racism and unconstitutional use of lethal force in the Baltimore, Chicago, and Ferguson police departments, and it described the level of force used by police officers in Cleveland as "chaotic and dangerous." Moreover, according to a 2015 FBI Counterterrorism Policy Guide, "domestic terrorism investigations [by the FBI] focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers." (emphasis added). Similarly, in 2006, the FBI released a bulletin called "White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement." Alarming as they may be, the DOJ and FBI reports of racism in policing are unsurprisingly consistent with historical reality that, in the United States, slave patrols were a precursor to police. Consider a more recent example: the federal government's "war on drugs," a campaign responsible for skyrocketing increases in the number of people (disproportionately Black) incarcerated in the United States. The war on drugs was initiated by President Nixon in the 1970s and exacerbated by President Clinton in the 1990s, and it was rooted in anti-Blackness from the start: John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy advisor, told Harper's Magazine that The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. Thus, anti-Black racism in policing is neither new nor accidental. #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName Anti-Black police violence undergoes waves of attention by popular news media, and reports typically focus on the experiences of Black men. In response to these trends, Kimberlé Crenshaw urges us to remember that "police violence against black women is very real. The level of violence that black women face is such that it's not surprising that some of them do not survive their encounters with police." (The Urgency of Intersectionality, TEDWomen; 2016). Moreover, according to the 2015 US Transgender Survey Report, trans people experience "high levels of mistreatment and harassment by police," and negative experiences are particularly common among Black trans women. Within the last decade, multiple movements have taken shape to raise awareness of systemic racism in policing and advocate for reform. In 2013, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi started the #BlackLivesMatter movement in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's murderer, George Zimmerman. Since then, the movement has expanded into a global "chapter-based, member-led organization whose mission is to build local power and to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes." (Note: there is a #BlackLivesMatter chapter in Bellingham.) In 2014, the African American Policy Forum (AAPF.org) rolled out the #SayHerName campaign in response to the unjust police killings of Gabriella Nevarez, Aura Rosser, Michelle Cusseaux, Tanisha Anderson, and other Black women. #SayHerName is "a movement that calls attention to police violence against Black women, girls and femmes, and demands that their stories be integrated into calls for justice, policy responses to police violence, and media representations of police brutality." By focusing on #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName, I don't mean to imply that resistance to anti-Black racism in policing began only recently. Indeed, because modern policing is rooted in slave patrols, the history of resistance includes historical figures and networks like Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad as well as present-day scholars and movements like Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Prison Abolition. The histories and movements described above inform the sociopolitical context in which physics is embedded. Put another way, physics is not isolated from issues of police violence. In fact, individuals and groups within the physics community have responded to this issue in a variety of ways. Police violence and physics The fatal police shooting of Tamir Rice (a 12 year old boy) received major news coverage, as did the shootings of Alton Sterling (37 years old) and Philando Castile (32 years old). Videos of all three shootings were widely circulated in news and social media. The fatal police shootings of Aiyana Jones (a 7 year old girl) and Rekia Boyd (22 years old) received less attention, but were no less devastating. In the physics and astronomy communities, the shootings elicited responses from individuals, groups, and organizations. Response from Chanda Prescod-Weinstein In 2017, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein wrote a poignant and unfinished essay called, "What is the plan for including Tamir Rice in #STEM?" From her essay: I learned recently that the American Geophysical Union believes that stating that #BlackLivesMatter is outside their purview, but also they want us to know that they are committed to inclusion. So, I have a question: what is the plan for including Tamir Rice in STEM? Are they aware that it is hard for dead Black children to become scientists? Are they aware that it is hard for Philando Castile to encourage his daughter to become a scientist? Are they aware that Alton Sterling’s children no longer have a father to help pay for the books that might open their minds to science? . . . [C]an we bring back Aiyana Stanley-Jones, who was shot because she was Black and seven years old and sleeping in her bed at home? Also, how about Rekiya Boyd? It might be that she was going to take a physics class one day that would change her life. And maybe then she would have changed ours. . . . Let’s be real though. These professional societies don’t have a plan for including Tamir Rice or Aiyana Stanley-Jones in STEM, and I don’t either because they’re dead. They were murdered by police officers who faced no serious legal repercussions for killing Black children because to the system, to you who refuses to oppose it, their lives were nothing but the smudges of a pathetic second class of post-slaves that you call African-Americans, because you’re polite. . . . The only plan to include me in STEM is the one that looks past the living and speaks to the dead and says we are going to mourn for you and fight like hell for those you left behind. Responses from members of professional committees In 2016, the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile provided the impetus for two statements from members of professional committees. First, members of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Committee on the Status of Minorities in Astronomy (CSMA) wrote a statement in support of Black Lives Matter. The statement was co-signed by members of the AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA) and the AAS Working Group on Accessibility and Disability (WGAD). From the statement: The recent extrajudicial killings of two Black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, by the police have shocked, disturbed, and frightened many of us today. We express our unequivocal repulsion to these acts, which are just one manifestation of the underlying systemic racism in our country. These events affect our community directly. Many Black astronomers in this country, especially those in junior positions, are suffering at this moment. We encourage all of you to be mindful as you reach out to our fellow Black astronomers, and be present with them during these difficult times. The undersigned reaffirm our commitment to ensure the inclusion, support, and safety of every Black person in astronomy. Black Lives Matter! Next, members of the American Physical Society (APS) Committee on Minorities (COM) and the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) Committee on Diversity (COD) jointly wrote a statement in support of Black Lives Matter: These events [the shootings of Sterling and Castile, and the fatal shooting of 5 officers at a Dallas protest] affect the physics community. Safety, justice, and equality underlie our ability to succeed at all endeavors, including physics. Systemic racism exists. Systemic racism exists in physics. And we all must work tirelessly to challenge the structures that allow it to exist. The APS COM and AAPT COD are dedicated to building a community where people of color can learn and practice physics free from racial harassment, bias, and fear. We are alarmingly far from this goal and we call on the entire physics community to join us in making this endeavor a reality. One way to move toward this goal is to engage in self-education and anti-racism training to build understanding in the ways that power structures combine with bias and racism to differentially impact physicists of color. This understanding is critical to our ability to affect change. We must create a climate that encourages and supports people of color in their pursuit of physics and physics careers. The undersigned affirm our commitment that Black lives matter and that racial justice matters, in our society and in the physics community. Importantly, neither of the statements by members of AAS CSMA, APS COM, and AAPT COD were official statements from the professional societies themselves. Indeed, it took about a year of coordinated internal and external pressure before the American Physical Society released a statement about systemic racial violence. Response from the American Physical Society With 50,000 members, the American Physical Society is the largest professional physics organization in North America, and I think it is the second largest in the world. Shortly after the release of an unofficial statement in support of #BlackLivesMatter by members of the APS Committee on Minorities, pressure began mounting for an official statement from APS. While members of COM coordinated internally with key decision-makers in APS, a group of white queer and trans people (mostly women) wrote and circulated an open letter outlining the realities and dangers of systemic racism in policing and its impacts on the physics community. Some of the authors of the open letter consulted with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and members of COM to ensure that the content and purpose of the letter were appropriate. Ultimately, hundreds of physicists co-signed the open letter. Finally, on April 23, 2017, the American Physical Society released an APS Board Statement on Racial Violence: Physics flourishes best when physicists can work in an environment of safety, justice, and equity. Therefore, all of us must work vigorously against systemic racism and to overcome implicit biases. The Board of the American Physical Society believes that it is timely to reaffirm the importance of building a diverse and inclusive physics community, as expressed in the APS Joint Diversity Statement (Human Rights 08.2). The Board expresses deep concern over incidents of racially biased violence and threats of violence against people of color. Racial profiling and physics In the United States, white civilians too often use calls to the police as a way to harass Black people. In the context of multiple DOJ and FBI reports noting systemic racism in police departments, such calls carry the threat of violence. Moreover, they reinforce the racist idea that Black people are criminals who do not belong in particular spaces, including college campuses and other places where physics and astronomy research happen. Thus, the phenomenon of white people using the police to harass Black people has an obvious impact on the ability of Black physicists and astronomers to carry out their work. Response from Simone Hyater-Adams About a year ago, in January 2019, Simone Hyater-Adams was interviewed by Filling Space about her research on Racial Identity and Physics. When asked about forms of bias, Dr. Hyater Adams's response included recounting an episode when police were called on a student of color at her university: A pattern of bias that can (and has) impacted physicists and physics departments is the pattern of calling the police on innocent people of color. This year, I witnessed this in my own department when a student of color was seen as “suspicious” while they were in the physics building after hours. The police were called on the student and while in this instance he was not harmed to my knowledge, there is national data and countless examples in the media that show how easily such an encounter between the police and a person of color can escalate to death. In addition, the professor who was involved sent an email to the department lists warning others about this student, and included a non-consensual photo of the student. Our department’s response was to reassure the person who called the police that they had done nothing wrong, instead of acknowledging the harm that they caused and the potential danger they put this student in. The department’s inability to publicly respond to the incident and the email had two big consequences: (1) it communicated that students of color are not seen as normal or innocent bodies in that space and therefore look suspicious; and (2) it caused this student to leave the department. Silence from department faculty, administration, and staff in moments of injustice communicates that discrimination through people’s actions as well as department and university policy are welcome in your space. These messages contribute to why students of color, and of other marginalized identities, decide to leave the field. Response from astronomers In 2018, members of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Committee on the Status of Minorities in Astronomy (CSMA) wrote a Statement Against the Policing of Black and Indigenous Students: We bring to your attention a string of recent incidents involving Black and Indigenous students being racially profiled on university campuses in the United States. We urge you to reaffirm your commitment to the safety of Black and Indigenous astronomers, and especially students, within your institutions. . . . Make no mistake, these incidents do not happen in a vacuum, but are the continuation of centuries of systemic racism and over-policing of communities of color, and the over-surveillance of Black and Indigenous bodies in predominantly-white spaces. As summer arrives, new Black and Indigenous students prepare themselves to move to new settings, either to join graduate or REU [Research Experiences for Undergraduates] programs. The signatories urge you to step up your commitment to their safety. A few recommendations for white colleagues include: Recognize that it is your duty to ensure that Black and Indigenous members of your scientific communities feel safe, protected and included - and take immediate action to protect them. Have conversations in your departments and research groups about the implications of white folks calling the police on people of color, which may result in their incarceration and violent (often lethal) action against them. Response from physics education researchers of color Beginning in 2017, physics education researchers of color created a discussion space for people of color at the annual Physics Education Research Conference (PERC). Last summer, members of that space wrote a document Emerging Reflections from the People of Color (POC) at PERC Discussion Space. One of the sections of this document focuses on "Dealing with Racism in General Society." Graduate student Brian Zamarripa Roman was the lead on this section, which includes the following excerpt: These incidents [incidents of interpersonal racism that sometimes result in calling police or other authorities] occur in general society and new incidents occur daily; thus, they are not only a possibility, but a reality during conferences. POC in the discussion space have been detained, handcuffed, and had their citizenship questioned by local law enforcement when walking back to their Airbnb. Others have also been questioned by hotel staff about their guest status during conferences on various occasions and conference locations. Individuals in the space have also been pulled over by police in their Uber on their way to restaurants at night and accused of drunk driving due to the driver having a non English accent. A large group of POC were kicked out of a bar after a minimal altercation with one of the individuals, while the white perpetrator was allowed to remain in the premises. Additionally, the AAPT conference in Texas raised serious concerns regarding the possibility of POC being interrogated and detained. These incidents were the ones willingly shared by POC in the space, however it is likely other traumatic racist experiences have occurred that were not brought to light. These experiences, as well as those happening in general society, lead to POC in PER becoming hyper aware of potential racist incidents and carrying a burden that their white counterparts may not be aware of. AAPT is an organization that promotes and encourages diversity and the Physics Education Research Community should endeavor to support diversity. As a starting point, the community should be aware of the triad of agents (businesses, individuals, and authorities) that potentially perpetuate racism and the ways they interact with POC who are AAPT attendees. Concluding thoughts To learn Black Physics History is to learn the history of police brutality and racial profiling by civilians and authorities alike as they apply to Black physicists and astronomers, including colleges students as well as children like Tamir Rice and Aiyana Jones who will never have the option of considering a physics major. This is history is heartbreaking, and I am grateful to Black women like Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and Simone Hyater-Adams who have vulnerably and publicly spoken up about their experiences and views. This is the first time I've compiled so much previous writing about racist police practices in one place. For me, my next steps include re-reading the various resources and recommendations, and thinking about which steps I could take locally as an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and which steps I could take as an active member of multiple professional physics organizations. Tags: racism anti-blackness policing physics astronomy aapt aas aps -- Dimitri R. Dounas-Frazer, Ph.D. (he/him) Assistant Professor Physics & Astronomy Department Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education Program Western Washington University Login to reply

AAPT Game Night: Reflections and Future Directions

posted by Joel Corbo, University of Colorado- Boulder and J.T. Laverty, Kansas State University on Feb 12 12:35PM UTC Last reply by Michael Wittmann on Feb 23 11:19AM UTC
(All photos in the post by AAPT photographer, Ashauni Lennox) Ever since the 2017 Winter Meeting in Atlanta, AAPT conferences have included a “Game Night” on the official meeting agenda. These events are a great way to bring together people from across the AAPT community in a low-stakes environment to meet each other, eat snacks, play games, and have fun. So what does an AAPT Game Night look like? Lots of people will be sitting at tables playing (frequently, modern) board games. There may be other kinds of games to play, such as ping pong, air hockey, or jumbo-sized Connect Four. There will also be snacks such as popcorn, ice cream, or the like. At the Cincinnati meeting, one group played a one-shot D&D campaign, and sometimes people bring their personal video game consoles, like the Nintendo Switch, for others to play. Game Night is attended by people from across the AAPT community and is a good place to network with physics teachers both inside and outside PER. If you’re interested in relaxing with other physics teachers, engaging with fantastical worlds, or just counting cards, then you should consider going to Game Night at your next AAPT Summer or Winter Meeting. Given the title and theme of this blog, we want to explore how Game Night came to be, how it has changed over time, and what might be in store for it in the future. Our focus is on the Game Night that has become part of the AAPT conferences. That said, board games have been a part of the PER community on and off for many years—informal game nights have existed at other conferences and as part of several groups within the community. Feel free to jump to the comments to tell your own stories of games in the PER community! The First AAPT Game Night The first AAPT Game Night was an unofficial event run by us (Joel Corbo and J.T. Laverty) and Dimitri Dounas-Frazer during the 2016 AAPT Summer Meeting in Sacramento. We were motivated to create it as an alternative social event to the long standing PER karaoke night. We were interested in creating a space that did not focus on alcohol, and we personally really enjoy playing games and teaching them to others. Even though it wasn’t an official event, AAPT was very supportive of this impromptu game night. Joel had been on PERLOC for about half a year at that point as the PERC Liaison, which meant that he had been in communication with AAPT about various logistical conference matters. He asked Tiffany Hayes and Cerena Cantrell, the AAPT staffers who organize the conferences, if there was a room available where we could hold a Game Night, and they provided one on very short notice (like a day or two in advance). The games were all from our personal collections, and we advertised primarily through Facebook posts, word of mouth, and the RiPE Meeting. Despite the last-minute nature of the event, a good number of people (30? 40? We’re not sure anymore) showed up to play games, and some other folks who had their instruments with them organized a “sing along/jam session” in the hallway outside the room where we were holding Game Night. The Evolution of Game Night After the success of the first unofficial Game Night, AAPT made it an official part of their conferences starting at the 2017 Winter Meeting in Atlanta. To be clear, Tiffany and Cerena took the initiative to make this happen—they added it to the program and registration process; reserved space; ordered snacks and drinks; and rented several table-based games (e.g., ping pong and air hockey). They did all of that on their own and we are grateful for it. They also asked us for game recommendations; AAPT now has its own collection of six games specifically for Game Night, to supplement the games that attendees bring from home. Since 2017, Game Night has been a regular part of all AAPT Summer and Winter Meetings. One of the outcomes of Game Night’s institutionalization is that it now is advertised to everyone, not just the PER community, and lots of different people from across AAPT attend it. This makes it a great opportunity for PER and non-PER people to network with each other. An additional outcome is that Game Night falls under the jurisdiction of the AAPT Code of Conduct, which is important to us since we want it to be a space that is as open, inclusive, and as safe as possible. While not officially part of AAPT and not technically connected to Game Night, the “sing along/jam session” that started outside the first Game Night has also continued, though often at different times and locations from Game Night. Looking Forward Given how well institutionalized Game Night has become, we expect that it’s here to stay as a fixture of AAPT conferences. We hope that it helps to foster interactions between people who might not otherwise have met, in a low-stakes environment where people can relax and be themselves. So, if you haven’t gone to a Game Night in the past, consider going this summer. If you have gone before, please go again! We also hope that telling the story of Game Night’s origin will inspire other folks to start their own social events at AAPT Meetings that are fun, open, and inclusive—perhaps a knitting circle, trivia night, or crafting event. The more that these activities emerge from the shared interests of the AAPT community, the better they will be at bringing people together and making for an enjoyable conference experience. Finally, we’d like to thank Tiffany and Cerena, not just for supporting Game Night, but also for all of the work they do to make Summer and Winter Meetings happen. There wouldn’t be an AAPT without them! Tags: History conference social event Login to reply 3 replies View all 3 replies Re: AAPT Game Night: Refl... (Michael Wittmann - Feb 12 2:50PM UTC) Re: AAPT Game Night: Refl... (Alexis Knaub - Feb 15 10:46AM UTC) Re: AAPT Game Night: Refl... (Michael Wittmann - Feb 23 11:19AM UTC)

Some personal stories about co-organizing PERC 2012

posted by Chandra Turpen, University of Maryland on Dec 13 12:30PM UTC
Curious on how an organizer got involved? Here's the origin story of how Chandra Turpen became a PERC 2012 co-organizer and the lasting impact the 2012's team work has had. If you are interested in organizing PERC 2021, go to this post for all the details. I would like to share my own personal experiences with co-organizing a PERC conference (back in 2012) as an example of what that process can look like, partially in hopes of demystifying the process a bit and encouraging others to take on such roles in the future. When my colleagues and I proposed to organize PERC, I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into. As a PER graduate student, I only had experience organizing a couple of PERC parallel sessions, but never something of this scale. In putting a proposal for PERC together, I was ~1 year out from having finished my PhD, had relocated to the Washington D.C. area, but was not yet employed at Univ. of Maryland (UMD). I had started coming to UMD one day a week to informally collaborate with folks there and joined a small but vibrant scholarly community which we called, “Affect gang” (see photo below). As a group, we had been reading articles and analyzing pieces of data together about the role of emotions and identity within physics/science learning experiences. We found fascinating areas of scholarship and brilliant scholars from areas outside of PER that we felt could enhance our work. We felt a sense of urgency around bringing some of these important ideas to the forefront within our community. Through affect gang, I made a few friends that I enjoyed spending time with and that were willing to collaborate with me on such an endeavor. This was part of the collective momentum that launched me into co-organizing PERC 2012 on “Cultural perspectives on learners' performance & identity in physics” in Philadelphia. In the end, I would be 8-months pregnant with my first child when PERC actually happened. A subset of "Affect Gang" at PERC 2012 in Philadelphia, PA: Brian Danielak, Ayush Gupta, Jennifer Richards, Vashti Sawtelle, Jessica Watkins, Chandra Turpen, Lama Jaber, and Luke Conlin (left to right) So, what did organizing PERC entail? We started by making a long list of potential plenary speakers. We read and discussed some of their notable papers, and decided on plenary speakers. We sent out invitations and coordinated some of their travel arrangements with them and AAPT. In collaboration with Lyle Barbato, we (a) solicited, reviewed, and selected proposals for parallel sessions, (b) reviewed PERC poster submissions and (c) developed a conference schedule and conference program. We coordinated with Cerena Cantrell at AAPT regarding conference room arrangements, AV requirements, and internet needs. We mapped out creative solutions for accommodating the unexpected multitude of contributed posters (more than 200) that were submitted that year. What went wrong along the way? Of course, organizing was quite a bit more work than I expected, but we had a strong team of organizers (Ayush Gupta, Eleanor Sayre, Jessica Watkins, and myself) all pitching in. We encountered unpredictable issues with one plenary speaker becoming ill, and weather preventing other plenary speaker from arriving when expected. This caused some panic at the time, but also created new opportunities for improvising and innovating new forms of community engagement within large plenary sessions. What makes it seem like a worthwhile thing to have done? It brought me great joy to be a part of the plenary sessions and some of the powerful community-generated parallel sessions that occurred at PERC 2012. Plenary speaker, Dr. Megan Bang, gave one of the first land acknowledgement statements recognizing indigenous communities at PERC. I experienced some community-generated parallel sessions with such deep emotional salience (such as the talk symposium organized by Apriel Hodari, “Finding a Home for All of Myself: Intersectionality in Identity Formation for Women of Color in Physics”) that I still remember them today. Co-organizing PERC helped me to build stronger relationships and collaborations with my co-organizers (knowing that there are people in the PER community that I can rely on as partners in doing meaningful/authentic work). It was inspiring to see the great interest that this conference theme elicited within the PER community and adjacent science education/DBER communities (there were 345 registered attendees at PERC that year, whereas the 5 year average before that was about 218 per year). In the following years, I’ve gotten occasional positive feedback from PER community members -- some appreciating the interactive plenary session that we improvised the night before, and others sharing that this was one of the first PERCs they attended and that it made them want to make this their professional “home.” It has been rewarding for me to see the generativity of organizing such community events, and seeing traces of the plenary speakers’ scholarship get taken up in subsequent PER projects and publications. I look forward to learning with and from others in our community as they step forward to take on this important role in our community. Trust me, this is a thing that you too, can do. Tags: PERC conference organizing Login to reply

Organizing a PERC: Comments from an Organizer Waist Deep in the Process

posted by Steve Maier, Northwestern Oklahoma State on Dec 12 1:03PM UTC
Curious on how an organizer got involved? Here's the origin story of how Steve Maier became a PERC 20/20 co-organizer. If you are interested in organizing PERC 2021, go to this post for all the details. Romanticizing a bit Steve Maier and Beth Cunningham looking at a concept map with colorful... Curious on how an organizer got involved? Here's the origin story of how Steve Maier became a PERC 20/20 co-organizer. If you are interested in organizing PERC 2021, go to this post for all the details. Romanticizing a bit Steve Maier and Beth Cunningham looking at a concept map with colorful rectangles At the PERC 2018 evening poster session, I was visiting with presenters and weaving in and out of the traffic of thought provoking conversations, just like most everyone else. Then at the end of the rows of posters, between the cash bar and the PERLOC “office hours,” I saw an otherwise blank wall divider with a few sheets of paper pinned to it. It was an open call for ideas for future PERCs! Curiosity of others’ ideas drew me in... Reading the posted notes and remaining in the moment, there was something about that unassuming bulletin board that opened PER up to me in a new way. Anyone could post an idea, as if to say that anyone engaged in PERC could serve as an organizer -- not just PER’s “heavy hitters.” I shook my head at the thought, knowing my role in PER has been one of an onlooker and practitioner rather than a shaker and a mover. Still, I added my own note about “pedagogical diffusion” because the notion of disciplines cross-pollinating and impacting one another resonates with me and I wondered if it did with others, too. Overcoming “obstacles” That act, along with conversations with others, eventually led to becoming part of an organizing team and recruiting additional organizers to submit a PERC proposal draft. The ins and outs of those interactions aren’t really fodder for a page turning newsstand novel, but here’s a quick rundown: Time was spent deliberating over whether or not the task was in my wheelhouse--so I hesitated Like everyone else, I have a lot of responsibilities that tax my time--so I had reservations I’m more of a PER wallflower than recognized for publications/grants--so I had doubts Deep down, I knew that committing to this effort would force me to engage in the community in a new ways--so I had motivation In my case, motivation alone would likely not have been enough. However, other PERC 20/20 organizers were (and remain) instrumental in helping me recognize there are meritable roles I can fill. Encouraging me to pursue my own spaces to contribute to PERC 20/20, the organizing team has provided a form of validation that I suspect will always be a highlight for me. I only hope I am returning the favor, because I am quite grateful. And now, the realities of organizing... Lin Ding, Steve Maier, and Beth Cunningham working on PERC 20/20, at PERC 2019 Working on the main theme, brainstorming about our own spin on things, and working out the finer details with members of the organizing committee has required video conferences, email exchanges, and in-person conversations that would not have taken place otherwise. While rewarding, these take time. And my advice would be that if you’re seriously considering organizing a PERC, be prepared to engage and set aside regular time in your schedule to do “PERC work.” It will not happen on its own. Wrapping up with a pep talk Steve Maier and Alexis Knaub, working on creating the blog during the 2019 summer meeting. And, if permitted to be so bold, I would say this: If you’re a regular contributor, practitioner, or participant of PER, PERC needs you--consider becoming an organizer. But there’s a less obvious and more salient point I’d like to draw from my perspective. So I’ll repackage the above statement in a way that helped motivate me to step forward: If you find yourself really looking forward to PERCs, its themes, and enjoy thinking critically about the sessions in the weeks/months following the return trip home, then PERC needs you. This is especially the case if your voice is one that is not the most prominent in PER. Organizers interact in PER at a new level, making new connections and establishing new collaboratives. Your perspective could provide just the looking glass others may need to carry the discipline further. Tags: PERC conference organizing Login to reply

Call for PERC 2021 Proposals

posted by On behalf of PERLOC on Dec 5 4:07PM UTC 1 reply by Steve Maier on Dec 5 4:14PM UTC
PERLOC (Physics Education Research Leadership and Organizing Council) is soliciting organizers for the 2021 PERC in Washington, D.C. If you are interested in organizing and you have an idea for a theme that will be of interest to our community, we’d love to hear from you! If you have... PERLOC (Physics Education Research Leadership and Organizing Council) is soliciting organizers for the 2021 PERC in Washington, D.C. If you are interested in organizing and you have an idea for a theme that will be of interest to our community, we’d love to hear from you! If you have any questions please feel free to email Erin Scanlon (erin.scanlon@ucf.edu), Chandra Turpen (turpen@umd.edu), or Vashti Sawtelle (vashti.sawtelle@gmail.com). Below we briefly describe what organizing PERC entails. More info is here http://tiny.cc/PERC2021_Solicitation. Details on previous PERCs may be found at www.compadre.org/per/perc. If you want to learn more about organizing PERC before submitting a proposal, you can reach out to prior PERC organizers. What is the role of a PERC Organizer? PERC organizational teams work with AAPT staff and PERLOC to: Developing the PERC theme Soliciting plenary speakers Managing all sessions at PERC Soliciting plenary speakers, manage parallel sessions and juried talks, and support any other activities they feel will enhance the experience of the PERC attendees. Note that the juried talk process is relatively new and may still be undergoing revision. Additionally, there are some logistical components that are the responsibility of the PERC organizers, typically in partnership with AAPT staff; these include updating the PERC website and program, coordinating space and accessibility requirements for sessions and travel for invited speakers, coordinating deadlines with the PERC Proceedings editors, being aware of spending, and communicating about PERC to the PER community. To support the PERC organizers and to ensure PERC runs smoothly, PERLOC has created a standing PERC Coordination Committee. This committee consists of the PERC organizers, a member of PERLOC, relevant members of the AAPT staff, and a PERC Proceedings editor. How do I submit a proposal? Interested teams should submit their 1-3 page proposals describing the organizers’ experiences with conference organization, the theme’s relevance to PER, and the vision for what the PERC theme will entail, including speakers and potential sessions, in PDF format by December 9, 2019 to Vashti Sawtelle (vashti.sawtelle@gmail.com) with email subject line “PERC 2021 proposal”. You can also send questions about the proposal process to Vashti. What happens after I submit a proposal? PERLOC reviews all proposals and selects the organizing team with consideration for: Relevance and importance of the theme to the PER community Connection of the theme to new perspectives and/or outside communities Timeliness of the theme Thoroughness and feasibility of the proposal Ability of the team to execute the proposal PERLOC will officially announce its selection at the next AAPT Winter Meeting. Login to reply 1 reply View all 1 replies Re: Call for PERC 2021 Pr... (Steve Maier - Dec 5 4:14PM UTC)

Aligning my PER Identity to my institution and my institution’s culture

posted by Mel Sabella, Chicago State on Nov 24 6:32PM UTC
My identity in PER and my identity as a physics teacher have changed quite a bit during along my physics path. I completed my bachelors degree at a teaching focused university then went to large research universities for my PhD and Postdoc, then began my position as a professor at... My identity in PER and my identity as a physics teacher have changed quite a bit during along my physics path. I completed my bachelors degree at a teaching focused university then went to large research universities for my PhD and Postdoc, then began my position as a professor at Chicago State University (CSU), a Predominantly Black Institution (PBI) focused on teaching. Different institutional strengths, identity, and culture means that PER looks different at different institutions and it is important that the community values the different kinds of ways that we all engage in PER. I found Physics Education Research (PER) while in graduate school at the University of Maryland. I had the opportunity to teach a bit as an undergraduate and knew I really enjoyed it. Once I got to Maryland in 1994, I sought out Joe Redish and started doing volunteer work for the Physics Education Research Group (PERG). I really enjoyed the work and the idea that research needs to accompany instructional material development just made so much sense! I decided to get my PhD in PER. For me, there was not really any physics topic that really excited me - it was more about the critical thinking, the problem solving, the getting stuck - doing a bunch of work - and then having a breakthrough - that was what I loved and continue to love about physics. I also really liked working with students and being creative in thinking about instructional material development. PER really aligned well with the aspects of physics I loved the most. After Maryland, I went to the University of Washington for a postdoc with the Physics Education Group. Both the groups at Maryland and Washington were wonderful and doing PER work with large research groups, where you were always bouncing ideas off of others shaped the way I engaged in the research. After my postdoc, I was fairly sure that I wanted to be at a smaller school that focused more on teaching - but I didn't want to give up research. I also wanted to work in a big city, so applied to positions in New York, Washington DC, and Chicago. I was excited to get an offer to become an Assistant Professor at CSU. Chicago State is a small Predominantly Black Institution (PBI) on the southside of Chicago. Doing PER at a university that puts teaching above research and doing it at an institution that had a very different population and culture than Maryland and Washington took some time for me to figure out. I also didn’t have a large research group to collaborate with. Each of these differences meant that the PER work I began at CSU looked quite different to what I had done in the past. I think there is a tendency in research fields to use the way research is done at R1 institutions as something for all to emulate and strive for - where multiple faculty, post docs, graduate and undergraduate students work together to build extensive projects with extensive research methodologies. While this is essential and necessary work in our field, it is not the only way to play contribute to PER. At Chicago State, I have a different set of resources than I had at Maryland and Washington. I have an awesome community who share common values around supporting student learning. I get to work with awesome undergraduate researchers who keep me excited about the work, get us moving in cool research directions that I would not have thought of, and do great work. I have awesome collaborators in STEM Education and a group of colleagues that put student support and success first. So, with different resources, my PER work and approach looks different than it looks at R1 universities. The focus of my research also changed to place more value on the culture of my institution. When I first got to Chicago State, I worked on setting up an education research lab and began focusing on assessing student understanding of various physics topics, following the implementation of the Tutorials in Introductory Physics. This was an extension of what I had done for graduate and postdoc work. I started to recognize that my students were really using the resource of community in the classroom - they were excited to do group work from the start of class. The work began to focus on the strengths and resources my students were bringing to the classroom and this remains the central focus of our work. While I still consider my field to be PER, I dont have the specific resources to do extensive R1-style studies- but Im very happy using the tools of Physics Education research to do small focused studies and tell stories of leveraging student strengths to create better classroom spaces. The Physics Teacher and the PER Conference Proceedings have been great venues for the dissemination of our work - these avenues of publication fit best for the type of work we do. CSU undergraduate researchers have accompanied me at AAPT and PERC since I started at CSU and my research students often present their education research work in these spaces. My PER identity has shifted quite a bit from when I was a graduate student to now, both in terms of scope and focus. I really enjoy the research narratives I am co-constructing with undergraduate researchers and colleagues at Chicago State University. While it may not be the type of extensive studies of large research groups with more person-power, I think the work we do is important. I also think that as a PER Community, it’s important to value the diverse types of work that different institutions are doing - and keep thinking about broad approaches to share research and explore diverse measures for evaluating research success. I think this is especially important as the PER community, that largely started at R1 institutions, is now at many types of institutions. There is great PER work coming out of a variety of institutions, from K-12 to Colleges and Universities, that we sometimes don’t see. Sometimes we don't see this work because of the differences in institutional status - sometimes it’s because the traditional, recognized, dissemination avenues don't align with particular work or don't align with the different reward structures at different institutions. It’s important that we are open and attentive to these differences and create spaces for all to share their specific flavor of PER. Tags: History identity institution type Mel Sabella, msabella@csu.edu, Chicago State University - Professor of Physics Login to reply

PER: Stepping back and looking back

posted by Bob Beichner, North Carolina State University on Oct 28 10:08AM UTC
As many of you know, I’ve experienced a relatively recent but substantial shift in my career orientation. (I’ve become a hospital chaplain. Interesting and fulfilling work, but that’s for a different blog or even a face-to-face conversation.) Anyway, the process of becoming a... As many of you know, I’ve experienced a relatively recent but substantial shift in my career orientation. (I’ve become a hospital chaplain. Interesting and fulfilling work, but that’s for a different blog or even a face-to-face conversation.) Anyway, the process of becoming a chaplain involves lots of introspection. I’ve had the opportunity to look back on where I’ve been and how I have invested my time. Much of my professional effort for the past three decades has been toward advancing the field of Physics Education Research. Given that this coming PERC will be the last one I will be attending, it seems fitting to take advantage of this, the conference’s great blogging space, to reflect on the field. It’s convenient that the theme of the PERC, without too much nudging, is along those same lines. People: The main ingredient One of the most enjoyable, important, and unique features of PER is the welcoming nature of those who participate. I take pride in the fact that green graduate students and old geezers like myself can sit down at a table and swap stories, ask each other questions, and just generally be good neighbors in the field. I’m happy there isn’t a lot of looking down on people who ask “dumb questions” since those of us with experience recognize that carefully listening to questions provides a huge opportunity for everyone to gain insight. Of course, you can discern some of what people don’t understand (which helps you remember what it was like to first figure it out yourself) but perhaps just as important, you find out what people think is significant enough to ask about. Where we’ve been I’ve been around long enough to remember when the questions being asked were not only, “What do students think about topic x ?” but also, “What should graduate students study as they become Physics Education Researchers?” That, in fact, was the main topic of the first US PER conference, held in Raleigh during the fall of 1994. That meeting wouldn’t qualify as a PERC since there wasn’t any direct discussion of research examining student understanding. Instead we were trying to decide what components should be in a PER graduate program. Not everyone came to the same conclusions, but we all knew what we were doing was important enough that we should be thinking hard about it. It was definitely worth arguing for your own particular perspective as well as listening carefully to the ideas of others. From those beginnings, new (or recently new) PER groups along with a few brave solo researchers could more confidently approach fundamental questions of, “How do we find out what students think about topic x ?” Then, just as our pathway to publication opened up—thanks to the APS—an explosion of studies on student understanding and cognition brought scores of interesting and insightful papers. Sure, we tested new instructional approaches we thought (i.e., guessed) would work. But we also began to develop, incorporate and appreciate theories of learning. Some started using those theories to guide the development of instructional materials rather than the other way around. We began putting our quantitative and qualitative methodologies under closer scrutiny, applying our mathematical acumen to improve research techniques, creating better mechanisms for analysis, and even starting to recognize limitations in what we can conclude. In short, we were doing real science. Even physics departments began to accept PER. (Those of us who have been around a while recognize what a huge achievement that was. It was well worth all the years of hard work it required. We are still not where we’d like to be, but most departments will, at the very least, apply aspects of PER-based instruction to some of their classes. If nothing else, PER-influenced textbooks are in use around the world.) Bridges to other DBER fields are being built—with much of the “infrastructure” for the other areas coming out of PER itself. Hopefully, the overall outcome of all these efforts is a better, more accurate picture of student learning and understanding. When you boil down all the different reasons for why we do PER, you end up with the student. How can we help students understand physics? Our impact An interesting aspect of PER is that the people who want to apply our research results far outnumber those actually doing the work. Given that PER got its start in AAPT, we’ve always had a tight connection to teachers in the classroom. Many of us, me included, earned our bread and butter by engineering direct applications of what we were finding out about student learning. It is worth remembering that a major chunk of the initial funding for my SCALE-UP project came from NSF’s Instructional Materials Development program of the mid-1990s. Back then proposals had to hide research inside a very carefully crafted evaluation of the impact of your newly developed curricular materials. Now it works the other way around. Grants are available specifically for discipline-based education research. We’ve come a long way. Thanks for the memories! So, as I close out my time in this field, let me say how much fun it has been watching PER develop and mature. (Although there have been a few growing pains I would have preferred avoiding!) It has been a privilege getting to know a few of the many different folks who comprise our field. From grad students hanging up their first posters to post-docs dreaming of tenure, from PER-soloists to big and small PER group members—all of you have been tremendous colleagues. Thank you for letting me be a part of this great effort. And all of us together should thank the teachers who have tried out the things we have uncovered and then returned with real-world suggestions and even more questions for further research. Isn’t it a wonderful endeavor?! Tags: history conference APS research teaching Login to reply

I’m in PER because of lucky circumstances, should it be that way?

posted by Nicholas Young, Michigan State on Oct 22 1:39PM UTC 1 reply by Alexis Knaub on Oct 22 3:05PM UTC
In late September, I took part in a science communication conference for physics and astronomy graduate students. It was the start of a breakout session, so naturally the moderator had each of us introduce ourselves and what we hoped to achieve through our science communication efforts. When it... In late September, I took part in a science communication conference for physics and astronomy graduate students. It was the start of a breakout session, so naturally the moderator had each of us introduce ourselves and what we hoped to achieve through our science communication efforts. When it was my turn, I said that I did physics education research and I wanted to tell people about this field as many people’s first exposure to physics education research is meeting someone who does physics education research, like myself. A few people in the room chuckled, but before then, I had never considered how physicists learn about physics education research. My PER journey started as a subject in a problem-solving study, which led me to work with a physics education research group. But what if I hadn’t had that experience and had went to an undergraduate institution that didn’t have a physics education research program? Would I still be a physics education research graduate student? Would I even know what physics education research is? As someone who dabbles in science communication, reflecting on my PER origin story makes me uncomfortable. On one hand, I want to inspire people by communicating science, but on the other, I’m in the field I am because of pure luck: I was lucky enough to go to a university that had a PER program and lucky enough to have that program studying the physics course I was taking. Despite meeting with several physics faculty during my college search, I did not know that PER even existed until two years into my program. Thinking back to our most recent PERC conference, we engaged in many great discussions about informal physics education and how we can develop interest in and excitement for physics in people of all ages and backgrounds. But what about developing interest and excitement for physics education research? Our work impacts individuals regardless of whether they identify as members of the physics education research community. So how then do we make sure our work reaches both groups? To be honest, I’m not sure what the answers to these questions are. The PER community recognized early on how important it was to make the work accessible to everyone, shown through our primary journal being open access. However, just because the work is available to everyone does not mean that the work is approachable or understandable to most. As we move into a new decade of PER, I think it is a good time to critically reflect on how we can ensure our work reaches those who our work is designed to support. While journal articles may be the standard way for us to communicate as researchers, they do not need to be the way we communicate with the larger physics community. Indeed, we should explore how we can use other media such as blogs, video, and social media to disseminate our work. Our community has developed best practices with regards to teaching and in the coming years, we should also establish best practices for communicating our work within the PER community and to the larger physics community. Tags: identity PER science communication Login to reply 1 reply View all 1 replies Re: I’m in PER because of... (Alexis Knaub - Oct 22 3:05PM UTC)

Helen Mae Cothrel: PER Identity as Its Constituent Parts, not Just P+E+R

posted by Helen Mae Cothrel, Kettering University on Oct 15 3:13PM UTC
My PER identity begins at my identity. I am a young, queer, disabled woman with mental illness working in a field in which I am far outnumbered. It continues through my educator identity (I knew I wanted to be some kind of teacher about a decade before I ever took a physics class) and my physics... My PER identity begins at my identity. I am a young, queer, disabled woman with mental illness working in a field in which I am far outnumbered. It continues through my educator identity (I knew I wanted to be some kind of teacher about a decade before I ever took a physics class) and my physics identity (I am an experimentalist). It ends at my research identity. I love collecting, pouring over, and sharing qualitative data about students, particularly data that I get through conversations or interviews with students. I do not have a research group, and operate in the realm of “Solo PER.” To be transparent, I am still finding my place in PER, and often have conflicting feelings about whether I belong. I feel isolated within my department as the “PER person” and as someone who does not have a PhD. I feel isolated within the PER community as someone without a research group and as someone who does not have a PhD. My path toward PER was indirect and painful. I am envious of students now who start doing PER as undergrads; I didn’t know PER existed until my second attempt at graduate school. However, now that I am here, I feel it is one of the only spaces in which I can really be myself. Education research gives me a chance to pursue my values in a way that physics does not. Students are my first priority. Students amaze me. Physics is pretty cool, I guess. I have a lot of human feelings, and want to learn more about our students’ human feelings. I have multiple disabilities that make traditional lecture + textbook courses disproportionately challenging, and want to advocate for increasing access to physics through thoughtful curriculum design. As a physics major who became an education researcher, I have great respect for the many paths our students may take after graduation, and want to support them. Qualitative research is how I can center all of these things in my work. So I arrive at my PER identity as someone who cares deeply about students and is enthusiastic about qualitative research and storytelling, but is a little lost at the moment in the grand scheme of things. Tags: Identity Solo PER Login to reply

PER Identity and Sense of Belonging

posted by Susan Rundell Singer, Rollins College on Sep 30 12:49PM UTC
I’m contributing to this blog as a biology education researcher (BER) and a higher education changemaker. Boundary crossing has enriched my career at all stages. In the context of PER, the early leadership and methodologies of the research community have informed my own work and... I’m contributing to this blog as a biology education researcher (BER) and a higher education changemaker. Boundary crossing has enriched my career at all stages. In the context of PER, the early leadership and methodologies of the research community have informed my own work and inspired BER broadly. Thousands of biology students benefit from the excellent work of the physics community partnering on teaching physics to biology students. I’m deeply grateful to my PER colleagues for all of this and also, for fomenting conversation and progress towards a PER identity, and by association, a Discipline-based Education Research (DBER) identity. One indicator of progress in this space is the extent to which faculty with PER and other DBER identities now have tenure and tenure track homes within disciplinary departments. What continues to fascinate me are the complexities associated with claiming a PER or DBER identity. Partially this can be attributed to the early stage of development of the field. Those experiences are not unique to PER or DBER. My graduate training was in plant development, an emerging field that pulled from plant physiology and the conceptual framework of animal developmental biology and genetics. The field evolved and began to synergistically cross boundaries with evolutionary biology and both plant and animal developmental biology. A new field, EvoDevo (shorthand for evolutionary developmental biology) emerged and I had the privilege of serving at the National Science Foundation in the late 1990s and early 2000s when we were creating a funding stream for EvoDevo research. About a decade later, I led the Discipline-based Education Research study and report at the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine that led to the opportunity to serve as director for the Division of Undergraduate Education at the National Science Foundation, as the division sought to further support and advance DBER. As I reflect on my experiences as a researcher and funder in both EvoDevo and DBER, there are parallels attributable to emerging field status, but there are also differences in how identity played out. Legitimacy and collaboration are at the core when fields come together, what we are currently referring to as convergence. Evolutionary biologists and more molecularly oriented developmental biologists use different tools, language, and conceptual frameworks. As an early to mid-career faculty member and program officer, I remember observing the frustration colleagues experienced as they tried to engage someone from the “other” field, sometimes complaining about their overuse of jargon. Gaining legitimacy took time as funding, courses, positions, conferences, and publication venues emerged. Yet, everyone felt comfortable in their identity as a biologist, even as they grappled with other subfield labels like EvoDevo. The conversations were more squarely focused on advancing the new subfield and obtaining a sufficiently robust funding stream to ensure the vibrancy of EvoDevo. Within DBER, my experience is that identity looms larger. At the root of the unease is the need to belong and to be recognized as a physicist or biologist. We know from the research that sense of belonging is key to the success of our students and that for those in minority groups, it has an even larger impact. We can reasonably extend these findings to the professoriate. Within DBER, it may be the specific convergence of fields, coupled with academic hierarchies, that exacerbate issues of belonging and identity. The reality of the academy is that a scientist is perceived to have a higher status than a colleague in the education department. Within the sciences, physicists claim a fairly lofty status. One can argue, and I have, that there are compelling and functional reasons why PER or BER faculty should be embedded within physics or biology departments, respectively. The research is driven by the disciplinary priorities of the field and co-location simply makes sense. Further, DBER work is both theoretical and applied. The value of DBER in improving learning and understanding can be more fully realized if it is seamlessly integrated into the department where the disciplinary education is taking place. There are faculty in colleges of education with deep disciplinary training and education research expertise that are also advancing the field. Indeed, by the 1970s, science education was breaking from a long held approach to education that was discipline agnostic, excepting the history of mathematics education dating back to the early 1900s. Science education found its home in colleges of education and much of the work is K-12 focused. While PER and DBER can extend beyond undergraduate learning, hopefully including graduate education, it is the undergraduate focus that wraps into the identity issue as well. The acceptance of PER as an official subfield of physics has gone a long way to support a sense of identity and belonging of PER researchers as physicists. Relatively synchronously with the emergence of DBER, Lee Schulman was supporting the development of SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) through his leadership at the Carnegie Foundation. SoTL is embraced across a broad range of disciplines including the humanities and social sciences. It encompasses a range of approaches from scholarly teaching to research quite similar to DBER. The research approaches build on the disciplinary methodology within the specific field, thus the qualitative methods valued by scientists will be distinct from the scholarly approaches someone in literature or history will employ. The range of modes of inquiry and welcoming of scholarly teachers leads to tension in terms of identity within DBER. The discomfort with the breadth of SoTL for some PER and DBER scholars is completely understandable as one considers another dimension of a DBER scholar’s identity. We rightly want to be seen and understood as having genuine research expertise in our domain. We value and care about good teaching, which often drives our research agendas. Simply being an excellent teacher, even a scholarly teacher, does not equate with being a DBER scholar. That distinction is an important aspect of DBER identity. Further, DBER scholars desire faculty positions where they are valued for their scholarship, not hired to be the departmental changemaker or to teach a disproportionate share of the courses. There are important roles for practitioners who prefer to focus on their teaching and use evidence-based pedagogy. Individuals in these roles deserve support and recognition, but those positions are distinct from conferring DBER identity. Perhaps this is the crux of the identity issue for DBER scholars who are simultaneously making the case that, while they may be first-rate practitioners, they are education researchers and also physicists or biologists. I have focused on PER and DBER identity within the academy, acknowledging that there are many opportunities for individuals with this expertise beyond the academy and similar challenges likely apply. While focusing on the nature of the work and advancing the field is always a priority, we need to attend to identity. The very best work will occur when PER and DBER scholars have a strong sense of belonging and believe their contributions are valued and uplifted by their colleagues. Tags: identity biology education research SOTL Login to reply

A mailing list and identity

posted by Michael Wittmann, University of Maine on Sep 25 8:47PM UTC 1 reply by Steve Maier on Oct 3 4:12PM UTC
In some private conversations, recently, I’ve been unpacking some stories about the past of PER, told from the perspective of someone who was a grad student in the mid to late 90s. That was not quite the first wave of grad students getting their PhDs in physics departments while doing PER,... In some private conversations, recently, I’ve been unpacking some stories about the past of PER, told from the perspective of someone who was a grad student in the mid to late 90s. That was not quite the first wave of grad students getting their PhDs in physics departments while doing PER, but it was close. In telling these stories, I’ve found that a lot of the newer members of the field aren’t as aware of them - how could they be? So, I thought I’d share some events from back in the day. It’s not that long ago, and yet it is. Also, to be very clear, these stories are very much my own version of history, and in no way should they be treated as wholly accurate. Others were also there, and I’m sure their voices would tell a different (and fun to read) story. For the record, I wrote a little bit of history in reply to the “First PERC?” post from early September. That was about conferences. This is about something as trivial as mailing lists and the identity that comes from choosing who your community is. Back in the 90s, the online place to be as a PER newbie was on PhysLrnr. Like all listserv software, names seemed to be a max of 8 letters (hence the missing e in listserv), so there you go: PhysLrnr. In 1994, the internet in its present form didn’t exist, Netscape was a brand new tool, social media was still a decade away, cell phones were not a thing, and pretty much all large-scale electronic communication happened via email lists. PhysLrnr and Phys-L were the two big ones, with Phys-L being more about instruction and PhysLrnr having more about research. Dewey Dykstra, former RIPE committee chair who worked on the Powerful Ideas in Physical Science, was the list owner, but mostly it seemed to be a hands off affair. Long conversation threads existed. (As an aside, the meaning of the RIPE committee to PER is worth writing up, as well. I don’t know enough to do so. But, the origin of it and its centrality up until the creation of the PER Topical Group is something that plays a big role in defining our community.) It’s helpful to understand how we shared knowledge at the time. AJP was barely publishing PER papers (the editor wasn’t a big fan), and the PER Section was still years away. TPT rarely published research-based work. Phys Rev PER was even further in the future, a dream that we couldn’t imagine could exist. For those working in physics departments, there was a strong need to look like physics - publishing in other journals was frowned upon, culturally, and there weren’t even that many venues for college level research. It’s hard to remember that at one point, citations of talk abstracts in The Announcer were treated as ways of having one’s work recognized. But, going to conferences was the easiest way to share ideas and learn something new, and Announcer abstracts could remind you of the talk you’d seen. That only the wealthy groups could send their students was pretty clear. Then again, there were so few research groups in the field at the time that we got to know each other pretty well over the years. In this context, a mailing list was a great way to do the thing that academia is all about: building up one’s reputation. After all, reputation is the currency of our field. The problem is, PhysLrnr wasn’t a great place for talking, because many (most?) of the members were not actually doing research. They were talking, but they weren’t basing their work on data in the way that we would, today. Also, the topics that were talked about were really only the physics, with little about identity, little about gender, little about ... well, about most of the things. Sure, some few were doing work in this area, but it was a Big Deal when something as non-physics-y as the Maryland Physics Expectations Survey was published. This is NOT physics, this is NOT physics education research, don’t you go down that slippery slope. It helped that someone with the overall physicist stature of Joe Redish was leading the work on expectations. After all, if the currency is reputation, he had plenty and could spend it on this topic. For others, it was harder, but they persisted, and they succeeded. (I love Laura McCullough’s blog post on this.) When a group of us were heading toward completing our degrees, around when the first big period of PER faculty positions was announced (I think there were 16 in 2000, or some such crazy number), a bunch of us started talking more extensively. We were post docs and graduating grad students. We were talking shop in a way that others on PhysLrnr were not. We didn’t want to have the same conversations. We wanted our OWN conversations, without anyone looking over our shoulder (without going into detail, there was one prolific poster, and one recurring topic, and it drove a lot of us batty). We wanted to help each other apply to the positions, even when we were applying to the same positions. We had gotten to be friends at years worth of AAPT meetings. When there’s only one PER session per time slot (sometimes only one on a given day!) then you start hanging out together. You eat dinner, you go have a beverage of your choice, you play endless card games in the dorm lobbies because that’s where housing is cheap, you... - you become friends. We were watching each other get married, have children, lose spouses to illness, move, change... we listened, we cared, we attended to each other, we witnessed, and we wanted to help. And we had this email chain that got bigger and bigger. Many of the people on this email chain had already been at the ICUPE/AAPT “interval day” in College Park in 1996 (see my response to the PERC 1997 post), but many were new to the list. Some were new grad students. Others were NSF-funded PFSMETE post docs, new to our community. (Back in the day before STEM was the branding term, the NSF used SMETE, so these were Postdoctoral Fellows in Science Mathematics Engineering Technology and Education - I think that’s what it stood for, and we all pronounced it Puff-Smeet. Which sounds ridiculous.) PFSMETE alums like Noah Finkelstein, Scott Franklin, and Andy Elby are still active in PER, but there were many others that aren’t as well known now, like Apriel Hodari, who branched out into other really interesting work, as well. Anyway, point is, the mailing list had a lot of members. And big reply-all chains are annoying. So we started a new mailing list. We kept it kind of secret, because it was meant to NOT be PhysLrnr. We wanted only active education researchers. We wanted people who were the newcomers in academia. We were, ahem, going to take over the world! We were YOUNG PER. So we created a YoungPER mailing list (check it out: 8 letters). We asked some of the folks slightly ahead of us (in seniority and, uh, age) if they wanted to join. They said no, this was a place for us young folks to be together. Two stand out in particular. Both ended up being structurally important (uh, essential?) to the field, but I won’t name them because it’s their story to tell. They were incredibly kind, totally understood what we were doing, and wanted us to have this list. They were also vehement in not participating. They wanted us to do this on our own. I remember feeling this wonderful thing: They trusted us to do right by the community. So, thanks for the offer, but you young folks go off and do your young thing. So now we had a mailing list. We’d created our own community. We had created an identity of being our own special group, the people Really Doing The Research. We had a culture of supporting each other, helping each other succeed. We shared ideas. We did the things you do when you work well with each other. For years, this persisted, even as we got older. It was grand. For what it’s worth, the mailing list still exists. I’m the list owner. People have joined over the years, though it was never really clear how people find out about it, or frankly why they do it. (Interested? Get in touch!) Things faded strongly once social media took off (in particular Facebook). Also, the community got larger and it was harder to know everyone in the field, as had been possible in the beginning. For at least a decade, communication has been nearly non-existent. The list right now is more an artifact of a time when mailing lists were the way to talk, and when a group of us were defining ourselves in opposition to a community that we didn’t feel like we belonged to, entirely. In keeping with the theme of PERC2020, it is very much a question of identity. And it hasn’t even been 20 years since the mailing list was created. It’s so recent, and so very very far away, as well. That’s just fascinating to me. Tags: History identity — Michael Wittmann, UMaine PER and RiSE Center Login to reply 1 reply View all 1 replies Re: A mailing list and id... (Steve Maier - Oct 3 4:12PM UTC)

More Computational Physics Education Research Please

posted by Todd Zimmerman, University of Wisconsin-Stout on Sep 22 3:44PM UTC
Before you read any further, stop and answer the following question for yourself: Where does computation fall in the experimental physics/theoretical physics paradigm? As an undergrad I know I viewed the computer as a fancy calculator that fell firmly in the theoretical physics side of... Before you read any further, stop and answer the following question for yourself: Where does computation fall in the experimental physics/theoretical physics paradigm? As an undergrad I know I viewed the computer as a fancy calculator that fell firmly in the theoretical physics side of things. You could plug numbers into equations, graph the analytical solutions, and if you asked in just the right way and got lucky, you could get it to solve a particularly unpleasant integral. As a grad student I started using computers to collect and analyze data. I viewed this as very distinct from the role the computer played in theoretical physics. The computer was a multi-purpose tools that did separate but slightly related tasks. When I started teaching, I used simulations in my class and it wasn't until I started using simulations during lab time that I started to suspect that computers may have a larger role in physics than I previously thought. When I first heard about the Faculty Development Workshop put on by the Partnership for Integration of Computation into Undergraduate Physics (PICUP), I knew I had to attend. At the workshop I experienced a Kuhnian-shift when they introduced the idea of the three-legged stool - physics rests upon the three legs of theory, experiment, and computation. All of the pieces popped together in my mind when I heard this - computation isn’t just a tool, it’s a way of tackling problems. After this revelation I started scouring the research journals to see what the best practices are or in hopes of find an FCI-for-computation. There doesn't seem to be. Early PER research showed that lecture did not serve the role most educators thought it did, prompting the shift to more active learning. Recent research has shown that labs do not serve the role of helping students understand concepts in the way we had assumed, asking us to reexamine our learning objectives for labs. My big fear now is what misconceptions do we have towards the role computation should play in education? I believe students benefit from modeling systems of particles on a computer, but does it really help them understand the related concepts? If the research on lab experiments is any indicator probably not. I believe learning to break a problem down and solve it algorithmically is beneficial. I know it helps me understand complicated problems, but I’m not my students. I’ve got a lot of questions about computers in the physics class room and I'm desperate for answers. It's in the early days answering these questions about the role of computers in learning physics but this looks to be an area that is ripe with interesting and important research questions. I hope you will hear my plea and consider taking a swing at some of these problems in your research. Tags: computation physics education research areas Login to reply

Laura McCullough: Physics(?) Education(?) Research(!)

posted by Laura McCullough, University of Wisconsin-Stout on Sep 12 3:48PM UTC
Identity is always a strange beast. In various classes and workshops, when people ask me to define myself in one word, the best I can come up with is “Laura”. My husband says when he met me, when I was 16 years old, I already wanted to be a college physics professor. That goal guided... Identity is always a strange beast. In various classes and workshops, when people ask me to define myself in one word, the best I can come up with is “Laura”. My husband says when he met me, when I was 16 years old, I already wanted to be a college physics professor. That goal guided me through 4 wonderful years of undergrad physics, and led me to physics grad school. And that, in turn, set me on the path of 20+ years of research on gender and physics. On the first day of physics grad school, during TA training, I was the only female student in the room. This was newly uncomfortable, since my undergrad program had two other women and four or five men. (I found out later the people running the TA training were very concerned that I would drop out.) I went through my classes, failed my written exam, then again. I also realized I didn’t like my classes, and wasn’t having fun. And how is advanced quantum mechanics supposed to help me teach?! After failing the written exam the third time, and having “helpful” male professors ask what I was going to do next, I got my M.S. in physics and switched to PER. At the University of Minnesota, the PER folks ran the TA training, so I had become aware of this subfield. I switched my program to Curriculum & Instruction, and LOVED it. This was what I needed to be a good teacher! My first AAPT meeting was in the summer of 1996, as the huge first cohort of PER grad students was rolling through. I see that in the notes from the 1997 PERC I am listed as having no idea what my dissertation would be about, but I was interested in gender stuff. Yeah, that’s still it. I have always been fascinated that PER is the physics sub-field that is the place where gender & physics research has lived. PER has welcomed my work, supported me, and given me great ideas for other directions to explore. I don’t do research specifically in physics, or education, or physics education. I do work at the intersection of physics, education, sociology, leadership, and diversity. Yet my home is PER and AAPT. Three years ago I accepted a nomination to serve on the American Physical Society’s Committee on the Status of Women in Physics. During my three years on CSWP, I have had the chance to discover new ways of talking about gender and physics, been introduced to many non-AAPT people also dedicated to supporting gender diversity, and helped promote gender diversity in ways I had never considered before. Expanding my work to the APS has given me perspective on PER and AAPT, and it has helped me learn new approaches to advance the field of physics by making it a more diverse and equitable place. In the science-fiction and fantasy world (another home community for me and my author husband), there is a derogatory phrase “fake geek girl”, used to describe so called “casual fans” who present as female, and which is far more likely to be misapplied than to describe any actual human being. Some people who self-identify as the “true geeks” look down on these casual fans because they feel that these women haven’t paid their geek dues by being there since the beginning, or not knowing the series and episode number of every title in every series. What does this have to do with PER? Even though my research doesn’t fit neatly into any one PER niche, I have never been made to feel like an outsider. This is my home community for exactly that reason, and I hope PER will always try to make everyone feel like a true geek girl. Tags: PER identity APS AAPT research teaching Login to reply

The First PERC?

posted by Steve Maier, Northwestern Oklahoma State on Aug 9 2:57PM UTC Last reply by Laura McCullough on Sep 5 12:59PM UTC
Photo of people at the first PERC in 1997 Did you know PERC 1997 was the first PERC paired with AAPT? It was framed as a workshop that ran 2 days prior to the 1997 summer AAPT meeting. There were 65 registrants (a set limit) and the schedule can be found here:... Photo of people at the first PERC in 1997 Did you know PERC 1997 was the first PERC paired with AAPT? It was framed as a workshop that ran 2 days prior to the 1997 summer AAPT meeting. There were 65 registrants (a set limit) and the schedule can be found here: https://web.phys.ksu.edu/per/denver/schedule.html The opening sessions were titled Poster session of research projects. Posters are limited to those research efforts which are assessing student learning of topics which are normally taught in physics and astronomy courses at any academic level Panel discussion on what other disciplines can contribute to physics education research Education of a PER grad student Cracker Barrel session on present research only grad students & postdocs could make presentations there was a 2 slide limit! The second day’s focus was on building concept inventories “that work,” qualitative research methods, & publishing in PER. So what’s changed since 1997 in PERC, and what remains the same? PER is still hard at work on methods, inventories & publications There are now undergrads doing PER! PER interacts with many disciplines . . . what else? Were you there?? Share a memory and/or your thoughts in a reply to this post! [Content for this blog post was originally published on Twitter @perc2020 on 8/1/2019] Tags: PERC conference history Attached File: perc1997b.jpg Login to reply 2 replies View all 2 replies Re: The First PERC? (Michael Wittmann - Aug 12 9:29AM UTC) Re: The First PERC? (Laura McCullough - Sep 5 12:59PM UTC)

PERC 20/20 Organizers on PER Identity

posted by Beth Cunningham, AAPT; Lin Ding, The Ohio State University; Alexis V. Knaub, Michigan State; and Steve Maier, Northwestern Oklahoma State on Jul 12 12:21PM UTC
Intro You may ask what this Blog is for? Well, we—the 2020 PERC Organizing Committee—have been working hard to prepare our community for the incoming conference next year. As you may already know, the theme of the 2020 PERC is about the history, current and future of physics education... Intro You may ask what this Blog is for? Well, we—the 2020 PERC Organizing Committee—have been working hard to prepare our community for the incoming conference next year. As you may already know, the theme of the 2020 PERC is about the history, current and future of physics education research. In other words, as the PER community continues to move forward, we need to take a pause and ask ourselves some critically important and yet easily forgotten questions, such as who we really are, what we really do, and why we do what we do. These questions are closely tied to the ultimate identities of ourselves. That’s why we created this space for our community, not only as a venue to reflect upon ourselves and/or our work but also as an opportunity for us to share with each other the key features about ourselves (be they professional or personal) that we haven’t yet got a chance to show through our published research. Remember, this is a friendly and safe space we created for you to write about yourself. So, dive in and enjoy! Physicist --> Administrator, Friend of PER Beth Cunningham Reflecting on my Physics Education Research identity, I need to go back to my training as a physicist. My doctoral research was on biologically important liquid crystals, specifically, phospholipids, and how various molecules such as fatty acids and various salts affect the structure and function of lipid bilayers. I worked with a range of scientists including a materials scientist, a biochemist, and a veterinary scientist. My post doctoral research was done in collaboration with a biochemist. Being exposed to different ways of thinking through work with a variety of non-physicist collaborators was particularly valuable and enjoyable. After I started my faculty position, I continued this line of research and collaborations. However, my faculty position was at a primarily undergraduate institution. The department was deeply interested in improving student learning, especially for student taking introductory physics. The department had written their own textbook and exposed students to topics in physics that are not normally taught in the introductory course such as quantum physics using bra-ket notation and particle physics. They also used the Force Concept Inventory for a few years in the 1990’s. Everyone was involved in teaching introductory physics and we all had a stake in the quality of the course. This was my first exposure to applying knowledge from physics education research to courses. I became involved in a number of organizations that focused on undergraduate STEM education such as Project Kaleidoscope and the Council on Undergraduate Research. I attended AAPT section meetings. I even incorporated active learning into the upper level physics courses that I taught. However, my formal research program continued to focus on biologically relevant materials and their physical properties. I made my way into higher education administration and my time focused on higher-level institutional issues that impacted students and faculty. My formal research program on phospholipids ended since I had no time to go into the lab and work (and didn’t have a lab as the chief academic officer at Illinois Wesleyan University). My interest in student learning continued and I also devoted time in thinking about and facilitating workshops on how to develop STEM faculty leadership. That work continues today. In addition, I am very interested in how we can broaden participation in physics. Most of my recent publications (as few as they are now that my time is devoted to administrative issues) are on this topic, particularly on women in physics in the U.S. Am I a physics education researcher? Not in the strictest sense. I’ve never carried out a PER study nor published in a PER journal. I am very interested in the field and read PER articles when I have time. I am mostly a “friend of PER” and a supporter of the field. I am deeply honored when someone considers me a physics education researcher. But, I have to admit that I am impersonating a physics education researcher! I’m OK with this. More importantly, physics education is improving because of the work that many physics education researchers are doing. I hope that being a part of PER in some way, particularly around issues of access and equity, will make the sub-discipline better. That’s what is most exciting about my contributions to PER through my role at AAPT. Researcher, International Scholar/Collaborator, Human Decency Lin Ding Who am I in the PER community? This question immediately makes me think of a different but related question; that is, how does the PER community view who I am? In other words, my instinctive reaction to this question is to immediately turn toward the outside for a reference point. Isn’t that interesting? Well, I do not know if I can summarize my identity into just a few lines of words. I certainly do not want to turn this into an abbreviated version of my CV, because that will seem to be missing the point. Anyway, I think my identity is the dynamic role I play in different contexts. I claim to be a discipline-based education researcher before my education colleagues. If they further ask what exactly I do, I will tell them I do physics education research, or more specifically I study secondary and university-level students’ content learning, reasoning and epistemological development in physics. When my physics colleagues ask what I do, I tell them I was trained as a physicist and am doing research on teaching and learning of physics. If they further ask me what it is, I will tell them I research on ways to improve physics education by finding and changing potential issues in curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Although my research methodology lies mostly in the quantitative paradigm, I often pay visit to the qualitative world for ideas that I can’t get elsewhere. In that respect, I think I am a pragmatist. I am also an international scholar, actively building collaborative relations with colleagues across the world. I enjoy working with diverse groups of people who think differently than myself and who are genuinely willing to help me see things from all sorts of angles. Lastly, but not the least, I hold high admiration for, and have the tendency to befriend with, those who exude human decency. After all, we are humans before we are researchers. That, I think, maybe is my ultimate identity. PER Identity- it’s complicated Alexis V. Knaub When we began discussing PERC 20/20 in January, one of my co-organizers came up with the idea of “PER identity” and discussed what it could mean. The idea has given me a lot to reflect on, which I tried to succinctly capture here. I think of Gee’s (2000) identity definition, being recognized as type of person, when I think about PER identity and myself. I have a lot of “markers” that indicate that my professional identity is attached to PER. In the past 4.5 years, I would say that I have “joined” PER in that I branched out beyond my doctoral institution. In that time, I: Spent three years as a postdoc with Charles Henderson at Western Michigan Participated in multiple research collaborations with those who would likely be identified as PER Had papers published in PER-relevant journals. Co-organized a PERC session entitled “People of Color (POC ) in PER” for the past three years Was a co-guest editor for a Focused Collection in Phys. Rev.- PER. And I’m now co-organizing PERC 20/20. I wrote this not to brag but to show that I’ve not been someone passively on the sidelines of this field. Yet, despite all these markers, I don’t really feel part of PER. When I think about my own experiences, as well as colleagues and friends’ experiences in PER, I think about how concerns go unaddressed or treated as trivial things, how power structures and hierarchies (those visible and those less visible) empower some and silence others. If we think of PER identity in how PER is perceived, this is part of how I perceive PER. I imagine this impacts whether and how individuals participate in PER, and in turn, what PER looks like in terms of who conducting PER, what research is produced, etc. This is certainly #NotAllPER. I have some amazing colleagues and true friends in PER. Some of what I described is very much academia or how people are. At the same time, I would rather have a more positive, less complicated PER identity both for myself and for this field. I find it difficult and tiring to engage with those in PER because of all of this, and I feel sad to see how all of this affects people. References Gee, J. P. (2000). Chapter 3: Identity as an analytic lens for research in education. Review of Research in Education, 25(1), 99-125. PER Practitioner, Collaborator, . . . Steve Maier Before I roll right into my PER identity piece, I’d like to share that doing so was more difficult than I’d expected. There’s a vulnerability with sharing one’s personal story and how it’s influenced them professionally, and I’ve struggled at times with being either too reclusive or overzealous in an attempt to fit in. It’s the result of an internal battle between a strong desire to identify with something grander (such as a prominent research group or project) but feeling as though I lack the currency to sit at the table. For this piece, I have tried to walk the line -- it has been instructive and maybe it will speak to others. At a critical point while working on this reflection, I stopped and simply asked “Why am I making this so difficult?” What I had in front of me were three different versions consisting of a drawn out history [explanatory narrative, perhaps saving a punchline for the end] a list of factors as to why my identity is what it is [me rationalizing or providing justifications?] non-linear PER storytelling [in reality, indicating atypical origins and future] The commentary [in brackets above] is me checking myself, questioning my own approaches. I stepped back and recognized that these approaches in and of themselves speak volumes. But the history, factors, and PER storytelling were not really statements of what my PER identity is. So I forced myself to blurt out loud to the wall who I thought I was in the context of “PER.” This is what came out: Currently, I identify as a PER-informed practitioner who is more of an onlooker and end user rather than a contributor or a known PER figure a Solo PER professional, working to set up collaborations and interactions for others trying to make PER connections a PER researcher trying to get back in the water Then I breathed, and decided to briefly address the numbered list at the top of this reflection within the context of the bulleted PER identities I let flow out of me. “History. . . “ While my PhD dissertation was in PER, it was completed at an institution without a PER group, solo or otherwise. So I’ve never felt super adept at PER. And to be frank, some of the early interactions I had while at PERC meetings at that time (and when I was more impressionable) convinced me that before I put myself out there I really needed to “know my stuff.” I likened publishing/presenting in PER to Chopped contestants presenting their dishes to over-critical judges. To be clear, I do not care for that analogy any longer, but it is indicative of how much of an outsider I felt like for a time. “Factors. . .” The most critical factor I’ve been faced with is that constraints dictate I will need to work with others to complete substantive PER projects. For quite some time, I was solo in many aspects. Now I realize that if I stay in this mode by choice, I will always have the “I lack the time and resources” crutch for not engaging in new and exciting projects. There will be times that I falter, but I have committed myself to not let this be a barrier any longer. This is a great segue to the third bulleted item. “PER storytelling. . .” While my roots in PER aren’t as deep as others’ and my ambitions may be more humble, I am excited to be engaged in new projects. My dissertation investigated natural language usage, reasoning ability usage, and FCI performance. Now I look forward to investigating physics for social justice, DBER programmatic issues/impact/growth, and collaborations with others implementing inquiry guided curricula. The span in scope of the projects illustrates one of the things I love about PER: The possible investigations are diverse and welcoming to creativity. To conclude, I posit that my PER identity will have elements in common with others’. And although the elements in common among some may be displaced by time and not match universally across all of those engaged in PER, the assorted and grouped commonalities are important for PER as a “community.” So that’s my spin on the PERC 20/20 Emergent Themes: Within PER, shared experiences define and have great influence over the successes of our efforts as a collective whole. Our working networks, relationships, and collaboratives we establish each contribute to the overall growth and health of the community. Tags: PERC 20/20 Organizers PER Identity Login to reply

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