Introducing students to the culture of physics: Explicating elements of the hidden curriculum

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of teaching the cultural aspects of physics, including epistemology, ontology, discourse, and intuition, to better prepare students for scientific thinking beyond just facts and methods.

Contribution

It explicitly highlights the components of the hidden curriculum in physics education and advocates for addressing students' intuition and perception to teach this culture effectively.

Findings

Students' perception of physics influences their learning process.

Understanding the hidden curriculum can improve physics teaching methods.

Cultural components like epistemology and discourse are crucial in physics education.

Abstract

When we teach physics to prospective scientists and engineers we are teaching more than the "facts" of physics - more, even, than the methods and concepts of physics. We are introducing them to a complex culture - a mode of thinking and the cultural code of behavior of a community of practicing scientists. This culture has components that are often part of our hidden curriculum: epistemology - how we decide that we know something; ontology - how we parse the observable world into categories, objects, and concepts; and discourse - how we hold a conversation in order to generate new knowledge and understanding. Underlying all of this is intuition - a culturally created sense of meaning. To explicitly identify teach our hidden curriculum we must pay attention to students' intuition and perception of physics, not just to their reasoning.