International Commission on Physics Education

4.5. Seminar on the Role of the History of Physics in Physics & Education (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970) (Brush and King 1972, Brush 1972)

This seminar was the smallest and most specialized of all the meetings that have been held under the sponsorship of the Commission. It had 32 participants, representing 12 countries (but with more than half from the U.S.A.). The impetus for it derived from the Rio de Janeiro conference in 1963, where Professors G. A. Boutry (France) and G. Holton (U.S.A.) had both discussed this theme.

The meeting was not lacking in controversy as to how, or even whether, physics and history (or physicists and historians) could be brought together. Martin Klein contrasted "the rich complexity of fact, which the historian strives for, with the sharply defined simple insight that the physicist seeks," and arrived at the pessimistic conclusion that "in this respect, at least, the modes of thought of the physicist and the historian of physics are antithetical." Others were more hopeful — for example, Samuel Devons, who felt that teachers of physics would experience enlightenment (and surprise) in learning the true story of how various physical concepts developed, in contrast to the packaged and distorted versions that find their way into many textbooks. Professor Dirk ter Haar expressed the view that the history should be presented in areas (e.g., certain aspects of quantum theory) where problems that troubled the creators of the theory (e.g., Dirac and Pauli) had been set aside rather than solved, and so might pave the way for future research. Some felt that an historical approach might help in spreading some knowledge and appreciation of physics to the wider public. The meeting took due note of the growing awareness and appreciation of the value of preserving the historical record of relatively recent physics through oral and visual, as well as written, materials.

The meeting adopted a format that has been paralleled in subsequent conferences, mixing plenary sessions with working sub groups addressing particular questions. Out of all this came a number of recommendations, the first of which was for the production of a book on the history of physics under the joint auspices of IUPAP and the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science. (This did not come to pass, but the proposed chairman of the editorial committee, Dr. Max Jammer, has since made major contributions along this line by his own independent efforts, as readers of his books will know.) Other recommendations, of a more general nature, urged that physics teachers be helped to obtain and use historical materials, that the acquisition and care of archival materials in all countries be encouraged, and that international cooperation be sought for information exchange, preparation of translations of important books and articles, etc.

4.6. Congress on the Education of Teachers of Physics in Secondary Schools (Hungary, 1970)(Brown et al. 1971)

This conference attracted over 150 participants from 28 different countries. Particularly noteworthy was that the opening address was by Professor P. L. Kapitza of the Soviet Union. Conceding that he was not a teacher, he nevertheless spoke forcefully and with great insight on the basic questions of scientific education in modern society. He saw as prime problems the need to educate young people in the creative use of their ever increasing amounts of leisure time, and also the need to foster individual creativity within the school context, Many participants in the subsequent discussion expressed their concern that young students were turning away from physics, and from science generally; there was speculation that perhaps major changes in approach and subject matter were called for. The conference did, however, spend most of its time discussing specific questions of teacher training and the constraints within which it is carried out. There were working groups on preservice training, in service training, curriculum innovation, educational technology and the special problems of developing countries.

4.7. General Conference on Physics Education (Edinburgh, 1975) (Archenhold et al. 1975, 1976, Paldy 1975, Lewis et al. 1976)

This conference, prepared and conducted in close association with Unesco, took for its purview the whole range of physics education at secondary and tertiary levels. As noted earlier it was the Commission's largest and most ambitious conference, and also the most truly international, with about 30% of its participants coming from 46 developing countries (out of the total of 73 countries represented). Most of the participants were teachers at college or university level.

The conference was organized around about 20 working groups, corresponding rather closely to a similar number of background papers on various topics, commissioned and printed in advance of the conference. In rough terms, the topics of the conference fell into three categories Course Content, Methodology, and 'Sociology' (this last including such topics as Science and Society, Women in Physics, etc.). Each participant was asked to choose two working groups in which he or she would join. The most popular topics were curriculum development, the relation of mathematics to physics teaching, and new approaches to methodology. During the course of the conference, each working group developed a report based upon the original background paper, modified by the group discussions and other inputs. After the conference, these reports were further edited, and published collectively as one of the Unesco New Trends volumes (Lewis et al. 1976).

The conference also had a number of plenary sessions addressed by distinguished scientists and educators, including Pierre Aigrain (now France's Secretary of State for Research), Hermann Bondi, A. R. Kaddoura (Assistant Director General for Science at UNESCO), and Victor Weisskopf.. The full texts of all these plenary talks have been published, and make very good reading (Archenhold et al. 1975, 1976).

Looking back, one can see that the Edinburgh conference was held at a significant time for physics education, and indeed for physics in general. It came after two decades of great activity, exciting discoveries, and massive expansion of physics as a professional field after the end of World War II. The student radicalism that had swept the universities a few years earlier had largely subsided, and in any case had affected science less than other fields. But by 1975 the chill winds of economic recession had begun to blow, and enrollments in physics (and other scientific and technical fields) had begun to dwindle, at least in the highly developed industrial societies of the West. Under the circumstances it was not surprising that attention became refocused on the recognition that an ever increasing part of our teaching must be concerned with those who are not going to be professional physicists, or even scientists of any description. Hermann Bondi pointed to the unreasonableness of ever designing our university curricula as if their main business was to produce future academic physicists when, in a steady state, only about 1% of our students can be absorbed into the academic positions that fall vacant through retirement of older faculty members. Professor Kaddoura, taking a still broader view, argued that the concept of education as something concentrated in time and space during a person's younger years must go, because the present system perpetuates social stratification — a problem that is particularly acute in the developing countries.

4.8. Conference on Teaching Physics for Related Sciences and Professions (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1976) (French 1976 a, b))

This conference had a total of 95 participants from 27 different countries. Its title very directly reflects the kinds of concerns mentioned above, and the conference tried to address in some detail the problems of teaching physics for other clienteles. It did this through separate working groups on physics for engineers, technicians, other physical sciences, life sciences, biomedical students, and prospective teachers. The results of their deliberations are briefly reported in one of the two published articles describing the conference (French 1976b).

Despite a good deal of effort, the conference did not attract many representatives of those other professions whose interests as consumers it was trying to address. Thus, although there was much fruitful discussion, this conference left one with a sense of unfinished business. A natural sequel to it, at some future date, would perhaps be a series of separate meetings, each concerned with just one consumer group, and with steps taken to ensure that the consumers were present in goodly numbers.

4.9. Conference on the Role of the Laboratory in Physics Education (Oxford, 1978) (Jones and Lewis 1980)

This conference had the special feature that it was a joint project of the Commission and the organization known as GIREP (Groupe International de Recherche sur l'Enseignement de la Physique), which was founded in 1966 and has a special concern for pre university physics and for teacher education.

The conference had 150 participants from 44 countries. Its theme was perfectly expressed by a Latin inscription that one sharp eyed participant observed on the wall of the Botany Laboratory in Oxford's Botanical Gardens: Sine Experientia Nihil Sufficienter Scire Potest. The participants came together with the conviction that good laboratory work is essential to the teaching and learning of physics; the concern of the conference was to discuss ways and means of achieving this goal.

Part of the background material for the conference was a set of six background papers, commissioned by Unesco,, on physics laboratories in various countries or regions: Africa, Chile, the Arab World, Eastern Europe, India, the Philippines.

The membership of the conference reflected a rich variety of backgrounds. There were people teaching physics at widely different levels, and under even more widely different local or national backgrounds. This was exemplified, quite deliberately, at the opening session, which had one speaker discussing the teaching of elementary physics in largely rural schools in the Philippines, and another describing a highly specialized laboratory at university level in a technical university in Sweden. But, as the conference proceeded, there was a convergence as the role of the laboratory was reappraised at all levels, and common ground between school and university, between developed and developing country, came to be appreciated.

The conference was organized into nine working groups concerned with different aspects of the general theme, and including (following the GIREP tradition) two groups concerned with very specific areas of subject matter (electronics and optics). Other groups dealt with such matters as low cost apparatus, assessment of laboratory work, open ended project work, etc.

4.10. Other conferences

As this article goes to press, preparations are almost complete for two international conferences to be held in 1980 one, at Trieste, on Education for Physics Teaching (in secondary schools) and the other, at Prague, on Post graduate Education of Physicists (primarily for research or for university teaching). In these topics we see a recurrence of themes discussed at earlier conferences, but this does not necessarily imply repetition, any more than does a series of annual conferences on a particular field of research. To be sure, progress in pedagogy is probably less rapid and less clear cut than in, say, plasma physics, but things do change, and — perhaps even more important — each conference brings together a significantly different group of people, through whom the first hand exposure to colleagues and developments across the world is gradually spread from an increasing number of local centres..

It should be admitted, however, that the pattern of the future may well shift, and perhaps ought to shift, in the direction of regional rather than fully international meetings. It is highly stimulating to exchange experiences with teachers from totally different backgrounds, but it cannot be denied that substantial changes in curricula and teaching methods are more likely to grow out of a concentrated and detailed effort by teachers from a particular region, who can get together in substantial numbers to discuss problems that they face in common. The Commission has no mandate to organize regional meetings of this sort, but it has been glad to associate itself with one such conference the Southeast Asian Regional Conference on University Physics (1977) (Singh 1977, Singh and Seward 1978), out of which came a proposal for the creation of an Asian Physical Society. Of course, many other national or regional associations exist and function independently of the Commission — such as the Latin American Center of Physics (CLAF) in Rio de Janeiro.

Mention should also be made of a conference on Co operation between Science Teachers and Mathematics Teachers of which the Commission was a co sponsor along with the International Commission on Mathematics Instruction, Unesco,, the Committee on Teaching of Science of ICSU, and the Institute for the Didactics of Mathematics at Bielefeld,, West Germany (where the conference was held, in 1978). The mathematical background of their students is a familiar concern (perhaps better described as a headache!) for all physics teachers, and this conference was a serious attempt to grapple with the problem at the secondary level. There would certainly be scope for similar joint conferences between mathematics and physics teachers with regard to teaching at university level, both undergraduate and post graduate. The interested reader is referred to the conference proceedings for full details (Steiner 1979).