Zollman, AAPT Summer 2009 Invited

Interactions between the Art & Science of Physics Learning-Teaching
Dean Zollman


“Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner, put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and in the way he understands it,…”* Long before physics education research began studying how students learn physics, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) expressed much of the goals of physics education research. Teaching is the art of realizing our students are not us and understanding how they learn topics which came easy to us. Some “natural” teachers seem to do this automatically and we can learn from how they do it. At the same time, research on the teaching-learning process can go a long way toward helping all of us understand how the student understands physics. This interplay between the art (what some teachers do naturally) and the science (physics education research) is the foundation for the continual improvement of physics education.

* Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author , 1848 English translation, Princeton University Press, 1998, available on Google Books.