Section 2.2 Shift toward a department culture that also valued teaching.
¶As an assistant professor, the future department chair chose to balance his research in nuclear physics with his interest in education. He began going to AAPT meetings “every year, always”, later serving on AAPT committees as well as APS committees, and obtaining several small NSF physics education grants. After he became chair of the department, he made several strategic moves to increase the department's emphasis on teaching:
And then...I became chair and started to try to negotiate some retirements...we had a dean who was very receptive to the idea and helped me by putting together some retirement packages...we were able to bring in some younger faculty...so at that point, 1990, 1991, the department wasn't really wedded to conservative teaching techniques.
During the early 1990's, he also served for a year as a program officer in the division of undergraduate education at NSF. His responsibilities included managing the grants of two prominent physics education researchers, Lillian McDermott at the University of Washington and Eric Mazur at Harvard University. Upon returning to OSU, he began trying some of their materials and techniques such as peer instruction (Mazur, 1997) in his own courses. Although he was nurturing interest in teaching among the new faculty, he described the culture as continuing in traditional ways, with faculty responsible for their own courses and little communication among them:
We were having very little dialogue between the people teaching those advanced courses so none of us knew what the other one was doing...that's the way physics departments work...
A faculty member confirmed this impression of a traditional departmental culture with little communication among faculty about their teaching, but also noted the faculty's interest in education:
I would say the department was fairly traditional at that time...there was a strong culture of doing good teaching but we didn't really discuss amongst ourselves what happened in the classroom particularly.
Another faculty member described “good teaching” at the time:
It was clear that the department culture really valued teaching very highly and that faculty were chosen in large part because they valued teaching but “good teaching” was giving good lectures, doing a good job in office hours, one on one, giving good homework assignments, challenging homework assignments but nobody had thought really about anything else.
This traditional culture of ‘good teaching’ was confirmed by an interviewee who became a graduate teaching assistant in the paradigm courses but applied for graduate study before the new curriculum had been designed and launched.
I went to visit as a potential graduate student and it was clear that they cared about teaching and that was very attractive to me because I knew that I wanted to teach.
This also was confirmed by an interviewee who had been an undergraduate student at that time and later became a graduate teaching assistant in the new Paradigms in Physics program:
Classes when I was an undergraduate were lecture courses or lab courses, one or the other, which I think at the time was standard and I think it's probably pretty standard still; so I can remember, for my mechanics course, going to class three days a week for an hour and the professor explaining what was in the chapter of the textbook and we would leave the classroom and do homework and turn it in and get back graded homework; we would take an exam and for the upper division courses...the only labs we took were the optics lab and we took an electronics lab (as separate courses).
Later, as a teaching assistant (TA) in the new paradigm courses, this graduate of the program experienced a shift in perspective, that although lectures had been effective, the new courses were a better way to learn physics:
Oregon State University was already a university that valued education...I felt like I got an excellent undergraduate physics education...I was somebody who learned really well from lecture and I thought, “Hey don't go messing with the system that worked well for me!” Nonetheless as a TA I learned so much more physics as a result of being part of this project; I totally came around to this is a better way to learn physics whether or not you learn well from lecture.
These interviews with the chair, physics faculty, and students at the time suggest that the initial conditions for the successful reform known as the Paradigms in Physics Program included a supportive college dean, a department chair interested in, well-educated about, and attempting himself to use reform teaching techniques, and physics faculty already succeeding in teaching well within a departmental culture that valued effective teaching as well as productive research.