open letter from the videographers to the participants

Today at lunch the videographers will be gathering with the participants to talk about what we do with the data we collect and what we learn from them. I have been trying to articulate my ideas about this in an open letter. It's still a bit rough, but I'm going to post it here now in case others want to think about it in the next 15 minutes before lunch:

A lot of you have been asking what we do with the video we collect and what we are learning by watching you.

We have been learning an enormous amount from you this week, not just about how elementary teachers think about energy, but about energy itself. You may ask, how can physics PhD’s learn about energy from elementary teachers?

In our training in physics, we have learned a lot about how to do calculations with energy and how to predict the results of experiments using energy. We have not learned about what energy really is, or what it means. Our schooling has not been at all like the course you are now engaged in, in which participants grapple with philosophical issues to which no one, not even the instructors, knows the answers.

What you are doing now is more like the experience of physics research, where physicists collectively grapple with new ideas and come to consensus. We have had that experience in the context of our specialties, but it is only through you that we have been able to have that experience in the context of energy, a seemingly basic, yet very deep, concept that is central to physics.

Physicists have defined some forms of energy and not others based on what problems they were trying to solve at the time. These forms have been canonized into rigid structures like SCREAM, but there is no reason why it couldn’t have been otherwise, and no reason we couldn’t come up with different structures. By watching participants in last years’ program invent phase energy to explain how a refrigerator works, we were able to gain new insights into how a refrigerator works ourselves. Phase energy turned out to be useful, even for us PhD’s, to understand something in a new way. By watching you grapple with forms of energy in a germinating seed, we are learning what forms of energy are for, and why we subdivide them in certain ways.

People, even scientists, imagine that after scientists make a discovery, it is ready for consumption by learners. In fact, educators do a huge amount of additional work to package scientific knowledge for learners, and in doing so, they change the way we all think about that scientific knowledge, which feeds back into the thinking and discoveries of the next generation of scientists. In this course, you, the learners, are also contributing to that packaging and to the way we, as educators and education research, think about scientific knowledge.

Your questions and your explorations challenge what we know about physics and how we think about what we know. By thinking about how to respond to your questions, we are forced to develop new tools for constructing physics ideas.