My Week at EPSRI

First of all I just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone at EPSRI this past week. Sorry I had to run out so quickly on Wednesday. I enjoyed working with all of you and really appreciated all your support and help with my energy pathway!

Here is a summary of my presentation:

I came into the week having finished my first year at Columbia where I took the year long introductory physics course (a course about how to solve problems). My other significant experiences were my internship at SPU last spring with the Energy Project and also my various teaching gigs (religious school, math tutoring, swim lessons). My internship last spring was pretty different from EPSRI because I was watching video after the fact and could spend a lot of time on just one episode. At EPSRI everything ran at a much faster pace, which created an intense immersion experience that really engaged me both learning-wise and research-wise.

Over the course of the week my ideas developed along two different trajectories: my ideas about energy and my ideas about teaching and learning. To track my ideas about energy I created an "energy pathway" (not sure what the best name for this is yet: pathway, journey, map, etc.). I'll make another blog post specifically about my pathway, but in summary I tracked how my personal concept of energy changed throughout the week and what the different experiences were that caused it to change. I think it is an interesting idea to have the teachers in the classes do the same thing both to give themselves perspective on how far they've come during the week and to inform the scholars and instructors as to what the teachers have been thinking.

My other line of thinking concerned my ideas about teaching and learning and the relationship between teacher and student. For most of my life, at least in a physics context, I've been in the role of student rather than teacher, but observing the UE1 class really allowed me to start thinking about the role of a teacher. Through watching the interactions between the instructors and the teachers I got a much better sense of the importance of student-driven learning. Half way through the week in the evening I spent an hour tutoring math and for the first time I was super-aware of everything I was saying and how the student was reacting. Not that I directly told her the answers before, but I was now much more conscious of trying to ask questions that would promote her own thinking and help her come to the answer herself.

Over the three day weekend break from EPSRI I gained a sense of the importance and uniqueness of the environments of the UE1 and UE2 classes. After having been completely immersed in open discussion of energy for five days in a row, I suddenly found myself cut off from interactions about energy over the weekend. My progress on thinking about energy that I had made throughout the week slowed way down, if it didn't come completely to a stop. Without the constant input of new ideas and without other people there to engage with my questions and ideas I had no one but myself to keep motivating my sense-making. (Note: I did try to bring the topic of energy up at the dinner table, but I got nothing but blank stares from the rest of my family). The weekend break made me realize the importance of the group learning environment where everyone is there to support each other and stimulate each other's ideas. This environment that is sustained for 7 hours each day is not one that I have encountered in any class I have ever taken, so not only do I realize its importance but also its uniqueness.

In the rest of my presentation I focused on specific episodes that were interesting to me. The first one I chose to share was when Heather brings up the question of the necessity of forms of energy. After discussing what is or isn't chemical energy, she admits to the class that she is debating if forms of energy exist at all and if there is not just one "pure substance" that IS energy. I blogged about this moment in more detail here.

The next episode I shared was the one in which Dorothy and Lezlie work with Brian to figure out why heat moves from hot to cold and not cold to hot. I find this episode very interesting because Dorothy discovers that Brian's resistance to the hot to cold reasoning is due to his using a different framework. Once she realizes this discrepancy she is able to explain the arbitrary decision physicists have made to use the reference frame of absolute zero for measuring temperature. I blogged about this episode here.

Finally I shared a comparison between an episode of Brian on day one and an episode of Brian on day five. Both episodes concern his thoughts on entropy. On the first day he directly asks Bill, a teacher who seems to know a fair bit about energy, what entropy is. All this thinking about energy has gotten Brian thinking about what happens "at the end" of the energy story. He comments that he finds depressing the idea that all the energy in the universe eventually spreads out and gets colder and colder. Then on the last day of the class he brings up the idea of entropy again and it is clear that he hasn't really changed his mind about it very much. He talks about the poet (Frost) describing how the world will end. In fire? In ice? And reiterates that he is very disturbed by the idea that energy will eventually dissipate. I found it interesting that his thoughts don't seem to change very much and that the issue was really emphasized for him as he learned about energy throughout the week.


At the end of my presentation I discussed what may come next for me. I will return to Columbia in the fall for my sophomore year and continue taking physics and astrophysics classes. I'm sure that my energy pathway is not finished and that it will continue to develop and reshape as I am exposed to new ideas; however I don't think it will ever progress as quickly as it did during the intense week of EPSRI. I also hope to take my new perspectives on teaching and learning and the student-teacher relationship and apply these new ideas to my various teaching ventures. Also, I'm confident that this experience working closely with a group of researchers has prepared me for whatever research I take part in next. Whether it's research about astrophysics, volcanoes, or physics education, I'm sure that my experience working with the rest of the scholars will inform the next research project I'm involved in.