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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.

Mainstream physics teaching and learning produces material outcomes that, when analyzed through the lens of Critical Race Theory, point to white supremacy, or "the systemic maintenance of the dominant position that produces white privilege" (Battey & Levya, 2016). In particular, the continued, extreme underrepresentation of People of Color in physics and a growing number of first-person accounts of the harm that People of Color experience in physics classrooms and departments speak to a system that valorizes whiteness and marginalizes People of Color. If we take Critical Race Theory as a lens, we expect that maintaining white supremacy in physics happens in part via discipline-specific instantiations of broader mechanisms that reproduce whiteness. In this study, we illustrate one such mechanism: race evasiveness, a powerful ideology that uses race-neutral discourse to explain away racialized phenomena, evading race as a shaping force in social phenomena. We offer examples from interviews with twelve university physics faculty, showing what race-evasive discourses can look like in physics and how physics epistemologies, discourses, and stories reify race-evasive frames. This work aims to support faculty in "refusing" race evasiveness in physics teaching and learning, toward developing "race-conscious" analyses that can help us challenge white supremacy in our discipline.

Perhaps the most commonly cited student idea about forces in the literature is the notion of an impetus force, defined as the "belief that there is a force inside a moving object that keeps it going and causes it to have some speed," that can then "fade away as the object moves along." According to the literature, even after physics instruction students use impetus force reasoning to argue that forces are necessary to sustain motion or that motion implies force. For example, many students drew an upward arrow to indicate a force on a coin that was moving upward after being tossed. The coin was halfway between the point of its release and its turnaround point. Interviews with students in the course indicate that the arrow was meant to indicate "the 'force of the throw,' the 'upward original force,'" and so on. Clement interprets these results to mean that students "believe that continuing motion implies the presence of a continuing force in the same direction, as a necessary cause of the motion."

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.

Among the student ideas about forces discussed in the literature, perhaps the most commonly reported is the notion of an impetus force, or the "belief that there is a force inside a moving object that keeps it going and causes it to have some speed." For example, Clement asked university students taking introductory mechanics to draw a free-body diagram for a coin that has been tossed upward. He found that students often drew an arrow in the direction of the coin's motion, at a point midway between the initial toss and the turnaround point, sometimes providing reasoning that suggested that the arrow corresponds to a "force from your hand" or the "force of the throw." Clement interpreted these responses as indicating that "student[s] may believe that continuing motion implies the presence of a continuing force in the same direction, as a necessary cause of the motion." As another example, in a study conducted with undergraduate students at Johns Hopkins University, McCloskey, Caramazza, and Green asked students to draw the path a ball will follow after it exits the curved tubes pictured in Fig. 1. The authors found that students often drew curved trajectories for the ball exiting each tube, and they coined the term "curvilinear impetus principle" to describe students' reasoning. They write that students reasoned as though "an object constrained to move in a curved path acquires a curvilinear impetus that causes it to continue in a curved trajectory for some time after the constraints on its motion are removed."

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.

Being responsive to the substance of students' disciplinary thinking is central to current visions of reformed science teaching. Studies of classroom practice, however, show that this kind of teaching is relatively rare. In this paper, we use data from one cohort of university physics Learning Assistants (LAs) to illustrate what it looks like for teachers to sense-make about being responsive to student thinking. We draw on the theoretical lens of sense-making--including Spillane et al.'s (2002) notion that teachers need opportunities to sense-make not only about the substance of new instructional approaches but also their own relationship to these approaches--to unpack the central questions that LAs asked about being responsive. We give evidence from course assignments that these LAs' extended sense-making was productive both (1) for their attention to the substance of student thinking and (2) to their identification with responsiveness as a central facet of good instruction, Our case study highlights the tensions that teachers may experience as they enter this instructional space and what "resolution" of such tensions can look like.

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.

Responsive instruction--or instruction that foregrounds and takes up the disciplinary substance of student thinking--is both a hallmark of recent STEM education reforms and challenging to enact. This kind of instruction may be especially challenging in instructional contexts that mandate or rely on curriculum with set, structured learning trajectories for students. In this paper, we propose a new component of curricular knowledge--in particular, an understanding of the purposes of questions or sequences of questions in research-based instructional materials. We show that this kind of curricular knowledge supported the enactment of responsive instructional practices among one cohort of 14 undergraduate physics Learning Assistants, illustrating the relationship between curricular knowledge and responsive instruction. We document some of the key phases in and tools that supported the development of this cohort's curricular knowledge, lending insight into how teacher educators might support the development of curricular knowledge in their own contexts.

Existing research identifying common student ideas about forces focuses on students' misunderstandings, misconceptions, and difficulties. In this paper, we characterize student thinking in terms of resources, framing student thinking as continuous with formal physics. Based on our analysis of 2048 written responses to conceptual questions, we identify six common conceptual resources for understanding forces. We document context-sensitive patterns in resource activation, and we discuss limitations of our research based on the demographics of our sample.

Responsive teaching--or teaching that builds from the "seeds of science" in student thinking--is depicted in STEM education literature as both important and challenging. U.S. science education reform has been calling for teachers to enact instruction that attends to and takes up the substance of students' STEM ideas; however, responsive teaching represents a substantial shift from the current state of affairs in most U.S. classrooms, where content is often presented authoritatively as facts, definitions, and algorithms, with little consideration of student thinking. Drawing on language from literature about sense-making, this paper identifies some of the "vexation points" that novice science teachers face as they consider implementing responsive teaching practices in science--that is, what doesn't make sense, to teachers, about this instructional approach. In particular, we show that novice teachers express moral concerns about responsive teaching; themes in their written reflections suggest that they perceive responsive teaching to put truth, success, and faith at risk. We argue that though these concerns originally seem distinct from the institutional constraints to responsive teaching posed by the literature, teachers' concerns about truth, success, and faith are in fact mutually reinforced by and reinforcing of external constraints. We use this connection to pose implications for research and teacher education.

Mathematics and science education researchers focused on teacher education emphasize attention and responsiveness to student thinking as central to effective classroom practice. Being responsive to student thinking involves attending to the substance of students' ideas--the meaning students are making--and pursuing that thinking, adjusting the flow of instruction as needed. Yet, attention and responsiveness to student thinking is irregular and generally rare among novice teachers. In this theoretical paper, we argue that the irregularity of attention and responsiveness to student thinking, including variability within individual teachers' practice, can be explained by a framework grounded in teachers' localized "framings" of their classroom activity--their sense of "what is it that's going on here." Using analyses of classroom episodes across contexts and timescales to illustrate our claims, we demonstrate how a framing-anchored framework can coordinate and improve upon three common explanations for the irregularity of novice teachers' attention and responsiveness to student thinking: underdeveloped skills and/or knowledge for attending and responding, "transmissionist" beliefs about learning, and institutional constraints (and teachers' perceptions thereof). Building on this argument, we suggest that teacher educators can work with novice teachers' framings of their classroom activities as a generative anchor for supporting attention and responsiveness to student thinking in classroom settings.

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.

The two of us (AR and LAE), in our teaching, research, and work with teachers, advocate for responsive teaching--an approach that seeks out and builds on the productive "seeds of science" in what our students say and do and assumes that "all students…are brilliant." This pedagogical approach requires a commitment to listening to and intellectually empathizing with students' scientific ideas.

The underrepresentation of women and people of color in physics has been attributed to a wide variety of factors ranging from society-wide conditions such as income inequality and sparse role models, to daily interpersonal interactions that disadvantage or discourage women and people of color from pursuing physics. These factors may be seen as manifestations of White and/or male privilege: social, economic, educational, or political advantages that are made available to Whites and males on the basis of their social identity. White male privilege pervades the discipline of physics as well as the classrooms in which physics is taught and learned. For example, physics is portrayed in textbooks as the product of individual great men, independent of all social or political contexts, rather than as being shaped by the culture of the European Enlightenment (among other cultures) or the conditions during specific international conflicts.

In this paper, we begin to explore the role of content knowledge in responsive teaching (RT), using "in situ" data to draw out and speak to a latent disagreement within the literature. We claim that one role that content knowledge plays in RT is to support teachers in eliciting, seeing, and then pursuing disciplinary connections within their students' thinking. We suggest an approach to teacher education that draws on the historical wisdom of the physics education research community, in which teachers develop content knowledge and then practice using that knowledge to listen and respond to student thinking.

"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.

On the basis of responses to written questions administered to more than one thousand introductory chemistry students, we claim that students often rotely apply memorized combustion rules instead of reasoning based on explanatory models for what happens at the molecular level during chemical reactions. In particular, many students argue that combustion produces carbon dioxide and/or water, even when the reactants do not contain hydrogen or carbon, an answer that is inconsistent with the principle of atom conservation. Our study also corroborates the finding that students frequently say that oxygen is "necessary for" or "used in" combustion reactions without connecting this reasoning to conservation principles, suggesting that this likewise may be a rotely applied, memorized rule.

Background: Medication synchronization (MS) improves adherence by allowing patients to pick up all medications at the same time. Pharmacy staff need training to utilize a MS program effectively. Objective: Evaluate the impact of a video tutorial with decreased extraneous and intrinsic load on pharmacists' and pharmacy technicians' knowledge and understanding of a MS program. Study Method: Participants completed a prequestionnaire to assess knowledge and understanding of the MS process. They then watched a step-by-step video tutorial and were reassessed by a postquestionnaire 2 weeks later. Study participants included pharmacists and pharmacy technicians employed at 1 of 2 pharmacies in 1 regional division of a large community-based chain pharmacy. Participants were eligible if they were registered and in good standing with the Kansas Board of Pharmacy and employed for greater than 30 days since July 1, 2018. Results: Twenty participants were included in the final analysis. The median age was 36 years, 14 (70%) were female, 13 (65%) were pharmacy technicians, and each study site had equal representation. Most participants, 15 (75%), had previously completed the standard MS training. There was a significant improvement in number of correct responses after the intervention with a prequestionnaire score of 61.3% to postquestionnaire score of 70% (P =.002). Significant improvement in knowledge was seen in participants who completed the previous training as well as first-time learners of the MS process. Conclusion: Optimizing training on MS processes by decreasing extraneous and intrinsic load improved the pharmacy team's knowledge and understanding of the MS process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Increased rates of international travel have led to a higher demand for healthcare professionals to provide travel health services. Community-based pharmacists are capable of meeting this need. Objective: This study evaluates the impact of pharmacists providing travel health services in a community-based pharmacy on participant understanding and satisfaction of travel education and preparation. Method: A trained pharmacist met with participants to review their medical history, travel itinerary, and provide education. Indicated immunizations were administered and the participant's primary care provider was contacted if prescription medications were warranted. A questionnaire was administered before and after the travel health consultation assessing participants perceived understanding of travel health information, satisfaction, and perceived monetary value of the service. Data were collected by 5-point Likert-scale responses, with 5 equivalent to strongly agree. Wilcoxon signed-rank test and descriptive statistics were used for evaluation. Participants were included if they had international travel planned within 12 weeks of the consultation. Results: A total of 12 participants were included. Participant understanding significantly increased for all 5 survey items relating to travel health information with a p value < 0.05 for each item. The largest change was for how to find medical help during international travel (medians and IQR were 3(2-3), and 5(5-5) for pre-and post-consultation, respectively, p = 0.003). Participant satisfaction questions received a median response of 5. Participants' perceived monetary value of the service was a median of $50 (IQR $50-50). Conclusion: Pharmacist-led travel health consultations improved participant understanding of travel health information and was of perceived value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]