Section 2.3 Informing Faculty of the Intended Re-envisioning Process via a Department Colloquium
The department colloquium was a weekly event in which faculty, graduate students, and sometimes undergraduates gathered in a lecture hall to learn from a speaker about recent research. The committee decided that this would be a useful venue through which to inform their colleagues about their plans. The flyer for the colloquium described the intent as follows:
This talk will launch a redesign of the Paradigms in Physics program – Paradigms 2.0 – intended to enlarge the scope and update the content of the original to reflect new needs and new research directions in the department.
In 1996, the original Paradigms program was launched as a unanimous, department-wide collaboration. The collective spirit of departmental ownership has allowed us to build and sustain a program with a national reputation for excellence and innovation. Paradigms is THE model upper-division program featured at the AAPT's New and Experienced Faculty workshops. We have received more that $2.5 M in continuous funding from the NSF and the department has become an active laboratory for a physics education research group currently involving 18 researchers from 9 institutions.
I will describe the process we envision for designing the new reform and discuss how everyone in the department can contribute.
The Paradigms 2.0 department colloquium began with the professor making a short presentation to inform newer faculty and to remind experienced faculty about the Paradigms in Physics program before requesting their participation in the re-envisioning process (See Appendix A). The presentation consisted of nine slides that:
- stated the title of the program, Paradigms in Physics, and provided an URL for additional information: physics.oregonstate.edu/paradigms
- summarized the philosophy underlying the current upper level curriculum with its emphasis on teaching students to think like physicists and on serving the needs of all students
- provided an example of a traditional upper-level physics curriculum in which students enrolled in multiple courses taught separately, with each focused on a particular sub-discipline, such as classical mechanics, for an entire term
- presented a chart summarizing the Paradigms in Physics curriculum in which students enrolled in a series of courses taught in sequence, one-at-a-time, with each based on a common theme across subject matter contexts, such as symmetry, for three weeks
- reviewed the unusual format of the current curriculum in which students enrolled in a series of three consecutive 2-credit courses that each met for one or two hours every day for three weeks each term
- described the pedagogical approach that included integrated labs and a wide variety of interactive engagement strategies such as small group problem-solving, computer visualizations, kinesthetic activities, small whiteboard questions, and sequences of activities as well as lectures
- listed aspects of the physics community that the program created for majors such as students, TAs, and faculty working together to enhance the learning of everyone, both faculty and TAS striving to be approachable via an open-door policy, and study rooms provided by the department and the Society of Physics students.
- and offered insights from two graduates, an engineer in industry and a physics graduate student, about their experiences in the paradigms in physics courses. They mentioned ways that these courses had enhanced their abilities to work in teams, focus on projects with quick turn-arounds, use computer simulations, and make progress at a rapid pace, even though feeling ‘lost’, by learning from and teaching colleagues.
After this brief presentation, the professor provided an overview of the re-envisioning process, discussed a timeline, and described expectations for participation. Expectations included requesting that:
- faculty and graduate students respond to an online survey,
- faculty teaching an upper-division course meet with a committee member to create a set of index cards listing the main topics of the course,
- faculty consult with the committee at least once to provide input to proposed plans,
- faculty participate in faculty meetings during discussions of the plan and the eventual faculty vote on whether or not to adopt the proposed revisions.