Alex Crombie, Sheffield Hallam University

Traditionally in UK higher education institutions most students are taught in single-disciple cohorts (Taylor, 2009). This encourages specialism and minimises some of the logistical issue that delivering information multiple to people can create. But does this method of delivery impact students in other ways?

The concept of a physics identity considers how a person situates themselves within physics but also where physics sits as part of them. Several authors have considered this in terms of developing places of community and engaging people within the discipline (French, & Krause, 2006; Hazari, et al, 2010; Hyater-Adams, Fracchiolla, Finkelstein, & Hinko, 2018), but not how this identity is created in light of what can be considered as an accidental competitive setting. In teaching students alongside others who are developing their knowledge at the same time and the same rate we have created a race.

The behavioural sociologist George Mead worked extensively on how people’s behaviour and identity is shaped through their interactions (Mead, 1934).  For Mead, human behaviour is deeply influenced by social environments, and the self develops as individuals engage in communication and take the perspectives of others. This idea is central to symbolic interactionism, a theory that focuses on how individuals create meanings through social interactions and how these meanings shape their behaviours.

Mead introduced the concept of the generalised other, which refers to the social attitudes, norms, and expectations that individuals internalise as they mature. It represents the collective viewpoints and values of society that influence an individual’s behaviour. The ability to understand the generalised other allows individuals to anticipate how their actions will be perceived and adjust accordingly.

In shaping their internal identity, a person reaches out to their surroundings and internalises the responses made from their actions and interactions. This, Mead said, is how people are formed. If we consider our setup from earlier – a single discipline cohort who are learning synchronously (the race), we have, by definition, half of the members of that cohort performing below average. The responses to this sub-population’s gestures (to use the language of Mead) made within their local society remind and reinforce their position within the cohort. All tests, work, and interactions in general throughout their degree learning will cement the idea of being below average. If we look at this through the full length of the degree, this position may never change and so in relative terms it would appear that they have not improved or progressed. By maintaining a specialised and synchronous local society students are being denied the opportunity to reflect on the absolute progress they have made within the discipline – they are travelling in a car without windows and so are unable to gauge the speed they are travelling at.

In the figure below, this failure to recognise absolute progress is shown to potentially even create a sense of decline in ability if measured against a local society average that is increasing more quickly. These students, who would still be succeeding in developing their own knowledge, would seem to be becoming worse practitioners in the discipline.

Whether physics as a discipline is more susceptible to this is a matter for further study. We could theorise that the nature of a hierarchical subject constrains learners to very similar paths and so encourages the race. The societal response to the discipline of physics may too play a part with students’ more deeply entrenching their academic identity within their core identity. Whether this is peculiar to the discipline of physics or not, there are some approaches that can be adopted to address these issues. Most notably among these is the introduction of interdisciplinary teaching, or at the very least, vertically integrated teaching. These two concepts refer to the teaching of different disciplines within one project or intervention and the teaching of different years of a degree within the same intervention. In this way we can expand the local society to include non-specialist and force students to acknowledge that the average understanding of a topic within the wider population is much lower than within their specialised local group.

Whilst studying whether interdisciplinary teaching affects students’ self-identity we examined whether participants self-efficacy (their belief that they will be successful within a specified area) was affected by such an intervention. There was a clear and strong improvement before and after such an intervention, which we hypothesised was related to the opportunities students had to reexamine the depth of their own knowledge considering this more representative local society.

The paradigm of university teaching is changing – the aftermath of the global pandemic, familiarity and availability of technology amongst many other drivers, however the entrenchment of disciplinary silos still seems to be present. If we wish to support all students, and especially those who may find a physics degree more challenging, then we should consider including more varied methods of delivery – such as interdisciplinary teaching.

References

French, S., & Krause, D. (2006). Identity in physics: A historical, philosophical, and formal analysis. OUP Oxford.

Hyater-Adams, S., Fracchiolla, C., Finkelstein, N., & Hinko, K. (2018). Critical look at physics identity: An operationalized framework for examining race and physics identity. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 14(1), 010132.

Hazari, Z., Sonnert, G., Sadler, P. M., & Shanahan, M. C. (2010). Connecting high school physics experiences, outcome expectations, physics identity, and physics career choice: A gender study. Journal of research in science teaching, 47(8), 978-1003.

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist.

Taylor, M. C. (2009). End the university as we know it. New York Times, 27, A23.