"Press release"

As we come into the last year-ish of the Energy Project, we are trying to get a sense of our accomplishments, especially since what we have done in the past few years is not at all what was planned. Our hired evaluators are pushing us on this partly because their job is to evaluate us relative to our own goals for ourselves. They routinely ask their clients to do what they call a "history of the future" exercise, for which the task is:  Imagine the project is over. Write a press release describing what it accomplished. 

To help us with this reflection we solicited thoughts from some savvy collaborators who we thought would give us helpful perspective on our project, and had a big ol' brainstorming meeting in which we filled the board with things that we either (1) feel we have accomplished (even if not necessarily documented) or (2) expect ourselves to have accomplished by the end of the project. That night I was inspired to write the press release. I had a little fun with it. Suggestions welcome.

=============================

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Multimillion Dollar Project Championed the Teaching and Learning of Energy in Physics

The Energy Project, the five-year, $3.7-million project that put physics education research and professional development at SPU on the map, has concluded. Among the prime contributions of the Energy Project was to improve the energy content knowledge of everyone involved – from teachers to faculty researchers. Some of this development leveraged the energy-as-a-substance metaphor into powerful new representations of energy, including Energy Theater, Energy Blocks, and Energy Diagrams. Armed with these organizing representational tools, learners tackled more complex energy scenarios than are normally attempted in physics courses. No roller-coasters for this crowd: instead learners took on refrigerators, cold packs, the Gaussian Gun, and electric circuits, among others. These rich tasks have given the Project unprecedented opportunity to identify K-12 teachers’ ideas about energy, including valid alternative ontologies for energy (e.g., as a fuel or a stimulus). Teacher interests drove researchers to take seriously topics not normally addressed in introductory physics, including the idea that what matters about energy is not only its conservation (as physicists normally emphasize) but also its usefulness, and how the quality of energy may deteriorate as a result of certain processes. This line of research led to a model for teaching about entropy, a concept that has been misused to bolster nonscientific arguments about evolution. Teacher interests also pushed faculty researchers into new intellectual territory in articulating the meaning and value of forms of energy, and in disambiguating energy concepts from force concepts ­­– then subsequently weaving together these two causal factors in an integrated mechanistic account of physical processes. This energy content development not only served K-12 teaching interests, but also advanced the field of physics.

The Project’s groundbreaking research about the teaching and learning of energy took place primarily in the context of innovative professional development courses. Unlike courses that simplistically tell teachers what to do, these courses were taught responsively; instructors attended to the disciplinary substance of teachers’ thinking, took intellectual concerns seriously, and used the observations they made to guide the course content. “The participants (and their interests) are driving the questions that the class explores, within limits,” said visiting faculty researcher MacKenzie Stetzer. “They are really taking ownership of the experience in a way that leads to a more explicit partnership between the instructor and the participants.” Collaborator Siri Mehus, faculty researcher specializing in interaction analysis, said, “In its design, the course seemed to find an ideal balance between openness (participants chart their own course of exploring and understanding energy concepts) and structure (exercises and activities are well-organized, logically sequenced, and clear in their purpose). As the parent of a school-age child, it makes me very happy to know that the people who are teaching our children (at least a few of them) are thinking about students’ learning in the way that this course promotes.” Goals of the summer institute included not only energy content but also the development of teacher agency in science, enhancement of teacher understanding of the nature of science as a flexible and constructed body of knowledge, and teacher recognition that they themselves could contribute to that body of knowledge. Goals of the academic-year professional development program included fostering teacher attention to the disciplinary substance of student thinking in a “video club” model, in which teachers collaboratively analyzed video of one another’s classrooms. In a capstone effort, the Project in its last year developed the means to support teachers in putting their professional development experiences to use in their own classrooms, the ultimate goal of any professional development effort.

In addition to the pragmatic effort to improve the teaching and learning of energy, the Project made extraordinary contributions to the development of cognitive theory, well beyond what had been originally envisioned. In making use of the energy-as-a-substance metaphor the Project aligned itself with cognitive linguistics, in which metaphor is a primary organizer of thinking and a significant factor in conceptual change. In using the body as a symbolic system for learning abstract concepts (in Energy Theater), the Project found itself contributing to the most current theories of embodied cognition. These contributions took the Project beyond the teaching and learning of energy specifically into the territory of how thinking and learning take place in general, and extended the reach of the resulting research into the learning sciences.

Had these efforts been merely local, they would still have been tremendously admirable. Fortunately, during the Energy Project years, the team at SPU launched itself into the national community of physics education researchers, sharing findings and recruiting collaborators at an unprecedented scale. Dozens of talks and multiple papers, both short and long, contributed to the PER community’s recognition of the extraordinary potential of energy as a research topic. The Energy Project Summer Research Institute (EPSRI), founded to help the Energy Project create and manage its hundreds of hours of video documentation, provided a diverse community of researchers with an arena for inter-theoretical research on a common data set and made SPU a hub for scholarly community, mentorship, and leadership development. “The EPSRI is a huge community-building exercise that provides the whole PER community with deeper connections and new skills. It aligns a community around common tools and questions,” offered Michael Wittmann, lead faculty in the Maine Physical Sciences Project. By the end of the Project, SPU team members had established a new Physics Education Research Group at SPU, grounded in the Department of Physics and the School of Education. With two new full-time research faculty, three new graduate students, and multiple faculty collaborators in addition to the permanent faculty at SPU, the team is eagerly anticipating its next multi-million-dollar research program.