Gender, identity & culture �in physics education

Anna T. Danielsson�Professor of Science Education�Stockholm University

When did you fall in love with physics?

The problematique

• Uneven participation in science. Why is this a problem?
• Technological progress and/or economic progression/global competitiveness.
• Social justice issue.
• How can more young people form a positive relationship to science?
• Making science relevant to students’ (everyday) lives.
• Different ways of approaching the same problematique: intresse, attitudes, identity, self-efficacy, motivation…

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(Lyon 1918)

Learning is not merely a matter of acquiring knowledge, it is matter of deciding what kind of person you are and want to be and engaging in those activities that make one part of the relevant communities.

(Brickhouse 2001, p. 286)

The pedagogic work of physics

• Many young people learn that physics ’is not for them’.
• Physics perceived as difficult – a ’hard’ science.
• Strongly aligned with notions of intelligence or cleverness.
• Associated with men and masculinity.
• Deferment of the ‘interesting bits’ (‘Shut up and calculate’).

Archer, L., Moote, J., & MacLeod, E. (2020). Learning that physics is ‘not for me’: Pedagogic work and the cultivation of habitus among advanced level physics students. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 29(3), 347-384.

Physics as a culture?

A pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.

(Schein, 2010, p. 18)

Why physics?

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Johansson, A., Nyström, A.-S., Gonsalves, A. & Danielsson, A. “Performing legitimate choice narratives in physics: Possibilities for under-represented physics students.” Online First Cultural Studies in Science Education.

Prestige & ambition

• Choice between different elite educations.
• Prestige in difficulty?

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Alva: I kind of decided between becoming a doctor or this, because the prestige guru is in me. […] I decided between Engineering Physics, [an interdisciplinary engineering programme], or Chemical Engineering. But I chose this in the end anyway, because it’s the broadest and you get the most choices, and prestige. Now, I’m completely honest [laughs], there’s prestige, absolutely, in it.

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Interest & ability

• Almost all students.
• Part of the script for a ‘physics person’: ‘childhood physicist’ (Hasse, 2008)
• Narrative work done for a personalized, independent choice narrative.

Stella: People always say that you will become like one of your parents but I don’t want… I mean, like this: but my dad is a space engineer. Then it’s like: “yes, but then it’s obvious that you are into space”. But I’m like: “I actually discovered this all by myself!” [laughing]..

Making a contribution

Hanna:

• Wanting to give back, help others have the same chance
• Building an institute for physics in her parents’ home-country.

Radin:

• Science/technology as an effective way of making the world better

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Stella: If someone asks: – What are you doing for feminism? – I’m a physicist Like, I think it’s quite fun. I’m here and I disturb things a bit. That’s great. I’m very satisfied with it [laughs]

• Not often highlighted as a motivation for physics in previous research – clashing with normative expectations in physics culture?
• ‘Girls in STEM’ as a sanctioned choice – benefits and recognition? (Lövheim 2014)
• Narrated by a few interviewees in relation to marginalized gender, class and ethnic/migrant positions.

Teacher: How many find this to be counter-intuitive and weird?

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One student raises their hand.

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Teacher: Those of you who don’t raise your hands probably need to give this some more thought, because this is weird.

(Field notes, observation, Year 3)

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Culture: Everyday practices producing shared meanings

Danielsson, A. T., Engström, S., Norström, P., & Andersson, K. (2020). The making of contemporary physicists: Figured worlds in the university quantum mechanics classroom. Research in Science Education, 1-12.

Everything we do is based in research, in different experiments done. This seems to work well – it’s not something we’ve just made up.

(Field notes, observation, Year 3, session 1)

Culture: Everyday practices producing shared meanings

Before every seminar there are preparatory assignments. These are the base for the clicker questions and for the work during the seminar. The lectures are built on that you’ve read the preparatory material. We won’t repeat it. We assume that you’ve read.

(Field notes, observation, Year 2, session 1)

Culture: Everyday practices producing shared meanings

Summary

• Reform-based teaching negotiated in relation to traditional physics teaching.
• Students to be fascinated by the ’weirdness’ and status of quantum mechanics.
• Largely an individualised perspective on learning (hard work rather than ’genius’).

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Learning as identity formation

Identity is not simply what an individual says about her relationship to, abilities in, or aspirations regarding science [...] Identity arises out of the constraints and resources available in a local setting. Identity is not just something an individual feels; it is not even what an individual does, although both feelings and actions are components of identity. A science identity is accessible when, as a result of an individual’s competence and performance, she is recognized by meaningful others, people whose acceptance of her matters to her, as a science person.

Carlone and Johnson (2007)

Gender as performative

• Gender as performative; something we do.
• Enacted differently in different contexts.
• Performed through behaviour, dress, speech, career choices, interests.
• Limited by local contexts.

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[P]eople are, consciously or not, citing conventions of gender when they claim to be expressing their own interior reality or even when they say they are creating themselves anew. It seemed to me that none of us totally escape cultural norms. At the same time, none of us are totally determined by cultural norms. Gender then becomes a negotiation, a struggle […] We don’t just choose it. And it is not just imposed on us. But that social reality can, and does, change.

Butler (2021)

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Gender & physics

I find it hard to talk to a lot of other women because their interests are so far from my own, that we don‘t really have a lot in common. I am not interested, I barely ever watch TV and I [always wear] the same clothes. Like, all the new clothes I get are gifts that people give me, you know. Um, my roommate has been cutting my hair for the last year and before that I got it cut a year before and I might get it cut this year. Like, to me there is just not time for these things. But I find that a lot of women make time for these kinds of things and I am more interested in computer games and, like, if I had to choose between getting my hair cut or playing a computer game I going to pick the computer game or any other game, but not getting my hair cut. I don‘t even like people touching me so much, so and thing, pedicures, nails, I hate all that stuff!

(Laura, physics student, Canada)

Ottemo, A., Gonsalves, A. & Danielsson, A. (Dis)embodied masculinity and the meaning of (non)style in physics, computer science, and engineering education. (in press) Online First Gender and Education.

Women often have to do considerable identity work to fit in:

• Distancing from/rejection of traditional femininity (Gonsalves 2014, Ong 2005).
• Stressing characteristics typically associated with women, such as their abilities in communication or small, dexterous hands (Gonsalves 2014).
• Academic exceptionality (Archer et al. 2017).

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Science identities: Situating the individual among relations of power

Culture: Everyday practices producing shared meanings

Lina continues to write formulae on the black board and says: ‘This surely is stunning!’ She continues with emphasis: ‘Note how beautiful this solution is!’

(Field notes, observation, Year 1, session 1)

Why study physics? For two reasons. First, physics is one of the most fundamental of the sciences. […] But there’s another reason. The study of physics is an adventure. You will find it challenging, sometimes frustrating, occasionally painful, and often richly rewarding and satisfying. It will appeal to your sense of beauty as well as to your rational intelligence.

University Physics, Young & Freedman (1996, p. 1)

I fell in love, simultaneously and inextricably, with my professors, with the discipline of pure, precise, definite thought, and with what I conceived of as its ambition. I fell in love with the life of the mind. I also fell in love, I might add, with the image of myself striving and succeeding in an area where women had rarely ventured.

Evelyn Fox Keller (1977, PhD in theoretical physics)

It can be hard to see the wonders of the universe through the social curd. Yet, here I am. As unattractive as the professional world of physicists can be, I am still completely dazzled by quantum field theory. Every year I feel like I am learning particle physics for the first time, and it’s still amazing.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (2021, astrophysicist)

Science is so much more than hard facts and lessons in critical thinking, just as a rainbow is much more than a pretty arch of color. […] Science helps us to see through a lens of deeper understanding and be part of a world of light and color, of beauty and truth.

Jim Al-Khalili (2022, theoretical physicist & science communicator)

Existential & affective factors: Physics – love at first sight

It started with my first physics lesson.

It was really like

I walked in there,

and we had our first physics lesson,

and then I felt

I'm going to become a physicist.

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So yes, the teacher talked about,

what happens if you cut a sheet in half,

and then you cut it again and again, how far can you go?

And I found that to be a very... an amusing thought.

How far can you go, where is the limit?

And I got a bit hooked on that.

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So it clicked there,

this is what I want to do now, I felt.

Existential & affective factors: Physics – love beset by obstacles

It's a love for me all the time.

But the one ...

the one I never got.

It's a lost love,

I think.

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[Physics] has been an extreme comfort to me.

This interest has been a great comfort

to me in all the times that I’ve been ill;

to focus on this interest,

it requires energy, it’s something difficult,

then you can't think about all that

and be troubled at the same time.

It’s rather impossible.

It has been a constant recurring

a refuge for me too.

• Physics engagement was told as transformative and salutogenic, as an existential need (Nyström et al., in manuscript).
• Epistemic affect, the feelings that people experience in relation to processes of knowledge (Jaber & Hammer, 2016).
• Handling these feelings (“meta-affect”) as an important aspect of learning science.

PHYSICS

DAZZLING

BEAUTIFUL

WEIRD

DIFFICULT

CLEVERNESS

PRESTIGIOUS

HARD WORK

ABSORBING

WELL-BEING

Stories of physics

In your classroom: Call for reflexivity

1) Everyday practices producing shared meanings:

• What does science (non)participation look like?
• What is taken for granted?
• Implicit & explicit messages?

2) Situating the individual among relations of power:

• What are recognised as good ways of being a physics student?
• Who do you expect your students to become?

3) Existential & affective experiences:

• Which affective expressions do you endorse/use?

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In your classroom: Call for action

• Focus on norms, not ‘outsiders’:
• Make norms and expectations explicit.
• Broadening what counts (Bøe 2023).
• Showcasing science as a human, social enterprise (Prescod-Weinstein 2021).
• Enactment of recognition, e.g. of student ideas (Bøe 2023).

There are many hypotheses regarding factors that may encourage female students to pursue careers in the physical sciences. […] No significant effects are found for single-sex classes, female teachers, female scientist guest speakers, and discussing the work of female scientists. However, discussions about women’s underrepresentation have a significant positive effect.

Zahra Hazari et al. (2013), p. 1

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…because as a Black woman I had barriers to break. I wanted to be normal, but felt I had to be extraordinary.

Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda (2021), p. 124

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References

Archer, L., Moote, J., & MacLeod, E. (2020). Learning that physics is ‘not for me’: Pedagogic work and the cultivation of habitus among advanced level physics students. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 1-38.

Bøe, M. V. (2023). Staying recognised as clever: high-achieving physics students’ identity performances. Physics Education, 58(3), 035012.�Brickhouse, N. W. (2001). Embodying science: A feminist perspective on learning. Journal of research in science teaching, 38(3), 282-95.�Fox Keller, E. (1977). The anomaly of a woman in physics. In S. Ruddick and P. Daniels (Eds.), Working It Out (pp. 78-91). Pantheon Books.

Carlone, H. B., & Johnson, A. (2007). Understanding the Science Experiences of Successful Women of Color: Science Identity as an Analytic Lens. Journal of research in science teaching, 44(8), 1187-1218. �Danielsson, A. T., Engström, S., Norström, P., & Andersson, K. (2020). The making of contemporary physicists: Figured worlds in the university quantum mechanics classroom. Research in Science Education, 1-12.

Gleeson, Jules (2021). Interview. Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’, The Guardian, September 7^th.z�Gonsalves, A. J. (2014). “Physics and the girly girl—There is a contradiction somewhere”: Doctoral students’ positioning around discourses of gender and competence in physics. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 9, 503-521.

Hasse, C. (2008). Learning and transition in a culture of playful physicists. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 23(2), 149.�Jaber, L. Z., & Hammer, D. (2016). Learning to feel like a scientist. Science Education, 100​(2), 189–220�Johansson, A., Nyström, A.-S., Gonsalves, A. & Danielsson, A. “Performing legitimate choice narratives in physics: Possibilities for under-represented physics students.” Online First Cultural Studies in Science Education.

Lövheim, D. (2014). Naturvetarna, ingenjörerna och valfrihetens samhälle: Rekrytering till teknik och naturvetenskap under svensk efterkrigstid. Nordic Academic Press (Kriterium).�Ottemo, A., Gonsalves, A. & Danielsson, A. (Dis)embodied masculinity and the meaning of (non)style in physics, computer science, and engineering education. Online First Gender and Education. �Ong, M. (2005). Body projects of young women of color in physics: Intersections of gender, race, and science. Social problems, 52(4), 593-617.

Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda (2021). The disordered cosmos. A journey into dark matter, spacetime, and dreams deferred. Hachette UK.

Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational culture and leadership. Jossey-Bass.

Resources

Maybe start here:�Gonsalves, A. & Danielsson, A. (2020). Physics Education Research and Gender: Identity as an Analytic Lens for Research. Springer: Switzerland.

Google scholar these researchers:�Zahra Hazari, Anders Johansson, Allison Gonsalves, Angela Johnson, Geoff Potvin, Ramon Barthelemy, Louise Archer, Heidi Carlone, Cathrine Hasse, Mia Ong, Angela Calabrese Barton, Adrienne Traxler, Jennifer Blue.

Teaching resouces:�STEP UP: https://engage.aps.org/stepup/home�The science capital teaching approach: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-and-centres/departments/education-practice-and-society/stem-participation-social-justice-research/science-capital-teaching-approach

And a classic:�Traweek, S. (1988). Beamtimes and Lifetimes. The world of high energy physicists. �Harvard University Press.

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