Section 1.4 The Paradigms Model for Dissemination
Within a few years of the initial Paradigms development, it became clear that no one would ever be able to adopt the Paradigms curriculum as a whole. This realization on our part coincided with a growing body of research that curricular innovations need to be adapted to local circumstances [6–7]. As a consequence, we committed to disseminating our curricular materials in a modular fashion so that adopters could choose to make use of our materials at any grain size, from a single activity to a whole course.
Once we decided to use modular dissemination, a number of different dissemination strategies became available to us. We currently use an online website to disseminate curricular materials for faculty; textbooks, some traditional and some online to disseminate the curriculum for students; and workshops to disseminate pedagogical strategies.
Central to our dissemination efforts was the development of a website [8] which now contains a base layer of over 1000 separate activities and homework problems which can be searched by keywords, physics subdiscipline, or pedagogical strategy. The format of this site has recently (2024) been updated to make it more intuitively usable. At the request of adopters, we have also articulated sequences of activities and course sequences.
This book represents yet another dissemination effort from the project. Here you will find an overview of the strategies and philosophies that underlie the Paradigms Project and a (short) description of the process that we used to make our holistic change. (A detailed study of our change process has been published separately [9].) Another chapter discusses upper-division pedagogical strategies, some of which are unique to us and others of which are extensions of known K-14 strategies to the upper-division. These pedagogical strategies are expanded on in another chapter with detailed narratives that illustrate how to use them. And finally, we have a chapter discussing a variety of topics in upper-division physics that develop over time in “curricular arcs.”
In the past, the standard way of disseminating a new vision for curriculum was to write a textbook. The ideal textbook encoded a preferred order through the content based on the author's understanding and experience, clear explanations of the major concepts and ideas suitable to form the basis of lectures, worked examples for students to use as models for solving homework, and a diverse set of homework problems. Our group has produced three textbooks of this type, on quantum mechanics [10], special relativity [11] (followed by a second edition [12]), and thermodynamics/statistical mechanics [13]. The quantum mechanics textbook, in particular, has encoded our preferred order through the content based beginning with spins first.
More experimentally, we have authored several free online textbooks. One, on electrostatics and magnetostatics for the beginning of an upper-division course in electromagnetism [14], takes care to develop the necessary vector calculus content along the way. This book links to another, more detailed book on vector calculus [15] intended for lower-division mathematics courses. The third book [16] covers other topics, such as Fourier series, appropriate for an upper-division physics course on mathematical methods. These books are integrated with the activities from the Paradigms website, now including interactive visualizations and simulations using GeoGebra and interactive calculations using SageMath
Shortly, we expect to link our curricular materials to both ComPADRE [17] and PhysPort [18] so that users of these comprehensive national databases will be led to our sites.