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Multicultural education invites teachers to support students in critiquing the foundations of a given discipline, with the aim of reimagining that discipline and the purposes it serves. In this paper, we present a series of cases in which high school physics teachers who are enrolled in a summer professional development course expressed vexation as they tried to integrate equity with the physics concept of energy and in which one teacher made significant progress in this integration. These cases serve to illustrate what teacher learning about multicultural education might look like in physics and what resources may support this learning. These cases also point us to some of the ways in which physics as a discipline and schooling as a system make it difficult for teachers to critically examine the canon.

Within whiteness, the organization of social life is in terms of a center and margins that are based on dominance, control, and a transcendent figure that is consistently and structurally ascribed value over and above other figures. In this paper, we synthesize literature from Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory to articulate analytic markers for whiteness, and use the markers to identify and analyze whiteness as it shows up in an introductory physics classroom interaction. We name mechanisms that facilitate the reproduction of whiteness in this local context, including a particular representation of energy, physics values, whiteboards, gendered social norms, and the structure of schooling. In naming whiteness and offering a set of analytic markers, our aim is to provide instructors and researchers with a tool for identifying whiteness in their own contexts. Alongside our discussion, which imagines new possibilities for physics teaching and learning, we hope our work contributes to Critical Whiteness Studies' goal of dismantling whiteness.

The Next Generation Science Standards lay out a model of energy that locates energy within objects and fields, and tracks energy as it transfers between these objects and transforms between forms of energy while always being conserved. This model of energy pervades much of modern science and represents a foundational, cross-cutting concept for students. However, because it is abstract, energy is a very difficult topic for most students to learn. The authors have developed Energy Cubes to help make energy more concrete for students. Energy Cubes allow groups of learners to represent the dynamic energy changes in real-world scenarios by moving and flipping cubes on a horizontal shared workspace. While Energy Cubes are accessible for elementary students, with carefully chosen scenarios they can promote sophisticated and rigorous reasoning and argumentation among learners at all grade levels. This article starts with a discussion of some of the affordances of Energy Cubes. It then walks readers through the processes of selecting and refining energy scenarios for use in the classroom, sequencing energy scenarios, introducing Energy Cubes to students, creating an artifact from Energy Cube conversations, and debriefing Energy Cubes. The article concludes with a discussion of the limitations of Energy Cubes.

Resources theory assumes that resource activation is context sensitive, and that an important dimension of context is the question students are answering. The context sensitivity of resource activation has been demonstrated empirically by case studies that show students using different resources to answer questions that are similar in focus. In this paper, we further substantiate and add specificity to the field's understanding of the context sensitivity of resource use by demonstrating a pattern in resource activation for questions about mechanical pulse propagation, superposition, and reflection. In particular, our analysis shows a pattern in the kinds of resources students use to answer different "styles" of questions about the same physics topic. Questions that ask for a prediction tend to elicit rules or procedures, while questions that ask students to explain an observation elicit these "plus" ideas about force, energy, and motion. Our results call both researchers' and instructors' attention to the style of question that they ask and the impact it has on the resources commonly cued for students.

Existing accounts of student thinking about mechanical wave propagation and superposition emphasize that students sometimes treat wave pulses as objects, saying, for example, that pulses bounce off of one another when they meet. In this paper, we present a context in which students explicitly reason about pulses as not-objects, instead describing pulses as disturbances or energy and arguing that pulses can be in the same place at the same time. Our analysis highlights that students have resources for thinking about mechanical wave pulses and that student thinking is context-dependent.

Much of the literature contributing to physics instructors' knowledge of student ideas (KSI) reports common patterns of reasoning that are framed as discontinuous with canonical concepts. Our work contributes new KSI about mechanical wave propagation from a resources perspective, framing student thinking in terms of context-sensitive pieces of knowledge that are continuous with canonical physics concepts. The intent of this work is to inform instruction on mechanical waves by identifying and illustrating some of the conceptual resources that instructors might expect their students to use. To support instructor predictions about student thinking, we identify resources that are common across multiple samples and questions. Our data include written responses to three versions of a conceptual question about mechanical pulse propagation. We use an emergent coding scheme to characterize a total of 851 written responses from 6 universities in the United States. Our analysis reveals three common conceptual resources: (i) properties of the medium either impede or facilitate the motion of the pulse, (ii) the speed or duration of transverse motion affects pulse speed, and (iii) the speed of the pulse is affected by its kinetic energy. We show how each of these resources can be viewed as continuous with formal understandings of pulse propagation.

The abstract nature of energy encourages metaphorical language. In educational settings, teachers and students use conceptual metaphors subconsciously to express their ideas about what energy is or how it functions in particular scenarios. However, research on scientific analogies and metaphors has predominantly focused on explicit instructional analogies, rather than implicit, everyday metaphor. In professional development for secondary science teachers, we sought to make explicit the embeddedness and ubiquity of conceptual metaphor in everyday language and in science--particularly, in energy--to expand teachers' understanding of their students' ideas. In our microcase study, we observed and video recorded four secondary teachers discussing metaphor. We used interaction analysis methods, focusing on how both discursive and nonverbal interactions between people, objects, and environment change over time, to analyze the collected data. We found evidence of teachers' (1) learning about conceptual metaphor theory and (2) finding value in understanding conceptual metaphor in educational settings. In particular, teachers acknowledged that if they identify implicit metaphors in students' science language, they will better understand students' ideas about energy. We present possible mechanisms for teacher learning about and valuing of energy metaphor; we also suggest how to support teachers in noticing and valuing metaphors for energy instruction.

"Content knowledge for teaching" is the specialized content knowledge that teachers use in practice the content knowledge that serves them for tasks of teaching such as revoicing students' ideas, choosing an instructional activity to address a student misunderstanding, and evaluating student statements. We describe a methodology for selecting and analyzing classroom episodes showing content knowledge for teaching about energy (CKT-E), and illustrate this methodology with examples from high school physics instruction. Our work has implications for research on teacher knowledge and for professional development that enhances teacher CKT-E.

Promoting positive attitudes about science among teachers has important implications for teachers' classroom practice and for their relationship to science as a discipline. In this paper, we report positive shifts in teachers' attitudes about science, as measured by the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science (CLASS) survey, over the course of their participation in a professional development course that emphasized the flexible use of energy representations to understand real world scenarios. Our work contributes to the larger effort to make the case that professional development matters for teacher learning and attitudes.

We report some of the common, prevalent conceptual resources that students used to reason about energy, based on our analysis of written responses to questions given to 807 introductory physics students. These resources include, for example, associating forms of energy with indicators, relating forces and energy, and representing energy quantitatively. This research responds to a need for large-scale, resources-oriented research on students' conceptual understanding and has the potential to support the development of an underexplored dimension of pedagogical content knowledge-knowledge of student "resources" for understanding energy. Our aim is to promote instructor take-up of the resources theory of knowledge, and we suggest a number of ways in which instructors might capitalize on the resources we report.

We observe teachers in professional development courses about energy constructing mechanistic accounts of energy transformations. We analyze a case in which teachers investigating adiabatic compression develop a model of the transformation of kinetic energy to thermal energy. Among their ideas is the idea that thermal energy is generated as a byproduct of individual particle collisions, which is represented in science education research literature as an obstacle to learning. We demonstrate that in this instructional context, the idea that individual particle collisions generate thermal energy is not an obstacle to learning, but instead is productive: it initiates intellectual progress. Specifically, this idea initiates the reconciliation of the teachers' energy model with mechanistic reasoning about adiabatic compression, and leads to a canonically correct model of the transformation of kinetic energy into thermal energy. We claim that the idea's productivity is influenced by features of our particular instructional context, including the instructional goals of the course, the culture of collaborative sense making, and the use of certain representations of energy.

Abstract: The abstract nature of energy encourages metaphorical language. In educational settings, teachers and students use conceptual metaphors subconsciously to express their ideas about what energy is or how it functions in particular scenarios. However, research on scientific analogies and metaphors has predominantly focused on explicit instructional analogies, rather than implicit, everyday metaphor. In professional development for secondary science teachers, we sought to make explicit the embeddedness and ubiquity of conceptual metaphor in everyday language and in science—particularly, in energy—to expand teachers’ understanding of their students’ ideas. In our microcase study, we observed and video recorded four secondary teachers discussing metaphor. We used interaction analysis methods, focusing on how both discursive and nonverbal interactions between people, objects, and environment change over time, to analyze the collected data. We found evidence of teachers’ (1) learning about conceptual metaphor theory and (2) finding value in understanding conceptual metaphor in educational settings. In particular, teachers acknowledged that if they identify implicit metaphors in students’ science language, they will better understand students’ ideas about energy. We present possible mechanisms for teacher learning about and valuing of energy metaphor; we also suggest how to support teachers in noticing and valuing metaphors for energy instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]