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Continuity and Change

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Continuity and Change PETER W. HEWSON CONTINUITY AND CHANGE From Physicist to Science Educator I recognized that my career path would be that of a science educator in 1977 when I applied for my first sabbatical leave. I had started out my professional life as a physicist, but in reflecting on what I wanted to accomplish in a sabbatical, I real­ ized that I was more interested in how students learned physics than in exploring the frontiers of physics itself. How did it happen that I moved away from the career path of a physicist? What is the legacy from my physics foundations that I have carried with me on this journey of transformation? What are the influences that drew my attention to and raised my interest in science education? What nourished my professional development in, and sustained the evolution of my interests in, and my activities related to science education? What contributed to the signifi­ cantly different direction my career has taken? PHYSICS FOUNDATIONS Physics fascinated me for two reasons. On the one hand, it explicitly deals with the natural world, by focusing on simple systems that yield to detailed, exact analysis. On the other hand, it uses the language of mathematics extensively. I was good at mathematics and I found a great deal of satisfaction in deriving clean, exact solu­ tions of problems. Geometric proof was challenging but rewarding, and calculus was a revelation to me. I knew, of course, that the real world was messy, but mak­ ing approximations, discarding small quantities, dealing with large numbers of particles were less appealing to me. I developed a view of the world that stressed the importance of deep, unique, exact, confined, causal accounts of natural phe­ nomena. An important part of this physics vision is the notion of an isolated sys­ tem, in which all the important interactions happen within its confines rather than across its boundaries. I started my university education at the University of Cape Town in my native South Africa, where I studied theoretical physics and applied mathematics. I then went to Oxford University (England) to study theoretical physics for three years, and completed my doctoral thesis entitled "On the interactions of :;t-mesons with nuclei." This was followed by two-and-one-half years as a postdoctoral fellow in theoretical physics at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), the site of the Tri-Universities Meson Facility (TRIUMF) an obvious fit with my doc­ toral studies. I returned to South Africa in July 1971 to take up an appointment in K. Tobin, W.-M Roth (Eds.), The Culture ofScience Education, 121-131. © 2007 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. HEWSON the Department of Physics at the University of the Witwatersrand (colloquially known as Wits) in Johannesburg. It is perhaps no surprise that my doctoral study focused on the implications of a model of a confined system-the interaction between a :;,':-meson and the nucleus of an atom. While the exploration of the model's implications required some fairly sophisticated mathematics, the model itself was quite simple. In retrospect, I was engaged in Kuhnian normal science. Courses on scientific methods or the philoso­ phy of science were not part of the core curriculum, and I simply immersed myself in doing physics. As a result, my notions about the nature of physics developed in quite an intuitive fashion. Yet they are important, because they played out implic­ itly in much of the early work that I did in science education, and continue to have appeal to this day, albeit now as part of a much broader array of epistemological ideas. SCIENCE EDUCATION AWARENESS AND INITIAL INTEREST I had no inkling that my future career would be in science education when I arrived in Vancouver in October 1968, to take up a postdoctoral fellowship in theoretical physics at the University of British Columbia (UBC). My mentor, Erich Vogt, and I soon agreed upon a new project and I settled into my new surroundings with all the excitement and trepidation that accompanies such a golden opportunity. I was on a straight path to becoming a physicist at a research institution or university. But several events during my first year at UBC took me in a different direction. I married Mariana Thomas in July 1969, Walter Westphal, and Walter Boldt set up a collaborative project between physics and science education called the Physics Education Evaluation Project (PEEP), and I took on the responsibility of teaching a tutorial section of a freshman physics class. Mariana grew up and was educated in South Africa. She completed her diploma as a science teacher at Oxford, where we met. She taught high school science in London, she was a research assistant in a zoology laboratory in Oxford, and for the eighteen months prior to our marriage, she taught science education at the Univer­ sity of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland in southern Africa. After her arrival in Vancouver, she was admitted to a master's program in science education at UBC, with Walter Boldt as her advisor. As a result, references to Jean Piaget, Thomas Kuhn, and others began to find their way into our dinner conversations, along with positrons and interactive mainframe computing. Walter Boldt completed his doctorate at the University of Illinois, under the supervision of Jack Easley. Walter Westphal was a visiting professor from Ger­ many in the UBC physics department with research interests in hydrodynamics. Their meeting at a party led to many productive conversations, as a result of which, they set up PEEP in which Westphal taught a non-calculus based introductory physics course, and Boldt supervised a team of science education graduate students who looked at the educational aspects of all components of this course: the large lectures to some 500 students, the associated laboratories and tutorials, and the assessment system. In structuring the project, Boldt drew on Flanders' interaction 122 .
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