Forms of energy - part 1 of many

There is a ton of interesting stuff happening in both classes on forms of energy. I'm a little overwhelmed by it all, but plan to get some of it down tomorrow. First, here's the background on what I've been thinking about going into this class:

We've been working for a while on writing a paper about teachers negotiating novel forms of energy (like phase energy). We know we've got some good stuff, but have been having trouble articulating our thesis. At the FFPER conference in Maine a couple weeks ago, Warren presented a poster on this topic and we got some great feedback from conference participants. Based on that, on the plane ride home, Rachel, Hunter, and I came up with something the following: People use at least three different epistemological frames when talking about forms of energy:
1) categorical - what general kind of a thing is this form about? e.g. thermal energy is the kind of energy that has to do with heat and temperature.
2) evidence-based - what is the evidence that we can actually observe that this form of energy is present? e.g. there's thermal energy because it's hot.
3) mechanism-based - what is physically happening in the system that is indicated by this form of energy, whether you can observe it or not? e.g. thermal energy means the molecules are moving faster.
We have observed that people tend to use these three frames at different times in conversation for different purposes, and we suspect that each is important, and that it's important to know which frame your students are in at any given moment so as to focus on the right thing in their conversation and not derail them by trying to help them correct something they've said "wrong" or missed because it's just not part of the frame they're in. We suspect that knowing about these frames could greatly improve formative assessment around forms of energy.

We have video data from a group of secondary teachers last summer inventing the term "phase energy" to describe the kind of energy that a gas has that a liquid doesn't. Early in the conversation, they use the term "thermal energy" to describe it. I get the sense that they know this term is wrong, but they use it as a placeholder, because they're focusing on mechanism (category 3), not names (category 1). Later in the conversation, after they've worked out the mechanism, they discuss what to name it, and there is no discussion of mechanism because they've worked it all out. It would be easy to look at the first discussion and say, "They're using the term thermal energy wrong, we need to correct them," but doing so would have derailed them from their productive conversation about mechanism. And it would be easy to look at the second discussion and say, "They're not talking about mechanism, just throwing out names!" without realizing that they've already talked about mechanism and that isn't the goal of this discussion anymore.

I think we've already seen lots so far this week to support these arguments, but will blog about that tomorrow.