Section 3.3 Interviewing Faculty to Ascertain Current Curriculum
The Paradigms 2.0 committee members spent the first few meetings during spring term strategizing what needed to be done by whom and when. The committee's first task was to find out what currently was being taught in each upper-division course. To do this, they made a list of faculty currently teaching junior- and senior-level courses. In deciding who should interview whom, they considered which committee member was most familiar with a course and most comfortable with the current faculty member teaching the course.
The committee members decided to use the same color scheme of index cards for each topic as had been used two decades before, such as pink for math methods, orange for thermodynamics, yellow for quantum mechanics, green for classical mechanics, blue for electricity and magnetism, and white for things added in such as professional development skills. They added purple index cards for computational topics, an area that had been omitted from design of the original paradigms in physics courses. These topics were currently taught in a series of separate computational courses but might be incorporated within the redesigned paradigms in physics courses. They expected to use several different colored cards within one course, given that the paradigms in physics courses had been designed originally to bring together instruction based on a common theme within different subject matter contexts.
As the interviews with individual faculty progressed, the committee members shared their experiences with one another, particularly commenting upon their growing awareness of grain size issues, of how detailed an accounting of topics would be needed. Given that the card sets for some courses were very large, they eventually clipped some of these cards together with a card on top with a boxed title representing the group. They eventually agreed to aim for about ten cards per course. Gradually they assembled a colorful array of sets of index cards for the various courses. Then they began to ponder what changes, if any, seemed desirable.