“Shut up and calculate”: the available discursive positions in quantum physics courses
“Shut up and calculate”: the available discursive positions in quantum physics courses
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“闭嘴并计算”：量子物理课程中可用的话语位置
DOI：
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发表时间：
2016
影响因子：
1.2
通讯作者：
M. Elmgren
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
A. Johansson;Staffan Andersson;Minna Salminen‐Karlsson;M. Elmgren
培养新一代物理学家通常被视为吸引好学生，教他们物理，并确保他们留在大学的问题。有时，还会提出一些问题，即可以做些什么来增加征聘的多样性。在这项对瑞典两所大学的三门量子物理学入门课程进行的研究中，我们从论述的角度出发，反问成为物理学家意味着什么，以及成为物理学家和从事物理研究的某些方式在这个过程中是否享有特权。在询问学生可以接触到哪些话语立场的问题时，我们使用课堂观察和问题解决课程，以及对学生的访谈来描述课程中的话语特征。许多学生似乎对量子物理课程抱有很高的期望，普遍表示比其他课程更欣赏这门课程。然而，我们的分析表明，要想成为一名“优秀的量子物理学生”，课程的主要重点是计算量子物理，这一点是有限的。我们认为，这可能会对未来物理学家的教育和物理学本身的学科产生负面影响，因为它可能会重现一种工具性的“闭嘴计算”--物理文化，以及一种精英主义物理教育。此外，许多选修课程的学生不是未来的物理学家，而论述立场的限制也可能对这些学生产生重大影响。
Educating new generations of physicists is often seen as a matter of attracting good students, teaching them physics and making sure that they stay at the university. Sometimes, questions are also raised about what could be done to increase diversity in recruitment. Using a discursive perspective, in this study of three introductory quantum physics courses at two Swedish universities, we instead ask what it means to become a physicist, and whether certain ways of becoming a physicist and doing physics is privileged in this process. Asking the question of what discursive positions are made accessible to students, we use observations of lectures and problem solving sessions together with interviews with students to characterize the discourse in the courses. Many students seem to have high expectations for the quantum physics course and generally express that they appreciate the course more than other courses. Nevertheless, our analysis shows that the ways of being a “good quantum physics student” are limited by the dominating focus on calculating quantum physics in the courses. We argue that this could have negative consequences both for the education of future physicists and the discipline of physics itself, in that it may reproduce an instrumental “shut up and calculate”-culture of physics, as well as an elitist physics education. Additionally, many students who take the courses are not future physicists, and the limitation of discursive positions may also affect these students significantly.