Teaching future K-8 teachers the language of Newton: A case study of collaboration and change in university physics teaching

This interpretive case study describes a collaborative project involving a physics professor and a science educator. We report what was learned about factors that influenced the professor's development of teaching strategies, alternative to lecture, that were intended to promote prospective teachers' meaningful learning and their use of canonical ways of communicating physics concepts. We describe how the professor's beliefs influenced the pedagogy that he used to communicate the language of physics and the nature of what was communicated. We also report how our collaboration fostered change as we developed a shared language that allowed us to discuss how students learn and to explicate the referent beliefs that supported the professor's practices. We found that focused reflection on referent beliefs led to a change in the manner in which the professor communicated with the prospective teachers. Traditional lecture pedagogy focused the professor's concern on how he was teaching evolved toward a pedagogy that focused on how students were learning. Classroom interactions were increased with a primary goal of orchestrating a discourse of physics initiated in the language already accessible to the prospective teachers. This change in the manner that classroom interactions occurred provided opportunities for the prospective teachers' language to evolve toward eventually communicating their ideas in canonical physics language. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 88:947–969, 2004