My field, physics, has some serious, stubborn and seemingly intractable problems. Women earn fewer than one-quarter of the new bachelors’ degrees in physics from US colleges and universities. Here is one issue that might be contributing to this situation: When women undergraduate physics majors were asked during a series of conferences held for them in January of 2017, about three-quarters of them said they had experienced sexual misconduct during activities related to their college physics studies.
Black students earn fewer than 5% of the bachelors’ degrees awarded in physics in the US, although it hasn’t always been that way. This percentage hit nearly 6% in the mid-1990’s – that is, the representation of Black students among new physics bachelor’s degree recipients is lower now than it was 25 years ago. In contrast, 15% of K-12 students in the US are Black.
In contrast, Hispanic students do seem to be making progress toward parity in physics bachelor’s degree programs, although there is a long way to go. In 2020, 10% of new physics bachelors’ degrees were awarded to Hispanic students, much more than the 4% share ten years earlier. Nevertheless, the 2020 percentage pales in comparison to the national share of Hispanics among K-12 students, 28%.
Physics isn’t the only field with problems like this. The situations in engineering and computer science are similar. This is something that all three of these math-intensive fields have in common.
Here is another thing all three fields have in common: Undergraduates majoring in these fields almost all take introductory-level calculus-based physics courses like the one I teach. You can look around my classroom and see some of these problems manifested. Only about one-third of the students in my classes are women. Fewer than 10% are Black (although 21% of Florida’s public K-12 students are Black). The share of Hispanics among my students is smaller than the 34% of Florida’s public K-12 students who are Hispanic.
What’s different about my class from most calculus-based introductory physics classes is what we do in my class: Instead of a standard large lecture hall learning environment, I teach in a studio-style SCALE-UP active learning classroom. My class, which generally has about 70 students, meets six hours per week (plus a seventh hour used for a weekly quiz). I spend only a little of that time – maybe 30 minutes per week – lecturing. Students spend the bulk of the class time working on learning activities (hands-on or simulation laboratories and collaborative problem-solving) in groups of three.
My two graduate teaching assistants and I spend our class time in conversations with students about their classwork (often in response to student questions) and looking to see whether there are individual students being left out of group discussions. Quite often, students who are being left out of group discussions are women. Occasionally, a group consisting of one woman and two men works well, but most often the woman does not participate. So I generally do not set up groups with one woman and two men. Instead, a group either has two women and one man – or three men (remember, there are not that many women in my classroom). Sometimes even the groups with two women and one man do not work well, and I’ll move the women from such a group into an all-women group. My students sit at round tables with nine seats, and recently I have been experimenting with all-women tables. The results have been remarkable: Women at these tables tend to be more relaxed and to stay in class longer than they did when working with men, who sometimes race to complete their classwork so they can leave class early as if there is a competition to see who can get out the door first.
Black students can be isolated in groups as well. Here is a concrete example: One Black student from a strong high school started the first semester course in a group with two white students. He was struggling, so I moved him to a group that had another Black student (along with a white student). Suddenly, both of these Black students improved their weekly quiz grades. At the beginning of the second semester course, I placed each of these two Black students in separate groups, each with two white students. The first Black student started scoring poorly on the weekly quizzes. When I moved him back to the group with the Black groupmate from the first semester, his quiz scores immediately and dramatically improved (the groupmate had continued to perform well at the beginning of the second semester). This sort of effect is not unusual.
Here is the bottom line: The studio-style instructional environment provides me and my assistant instructors the opportunity to identify students who are struggling to fully participate in their collaborative learning groups and to move them to groups in which they can participate more fully and learn physics with greater understanding.
In fact, this is what the research on SCALE-UP studio-style learning environments says: These environments improve physics learning for all students, but especially for women and Black and Hispanic students.
So am I being woke? That is a serious question for instructors in Florida’s public universities and colleges, where instruction that is considered woke is now under scrutiny.
I am certainly conscious of the gender and race of my students and how that might affect their physics learning. And my students notice this. For example, I work hard to learn students’ first names as early in the semester as possible. One man asked why I learn the names of the women in my classroom more quickly than the men’s names. He had a bit of a leer on his face as he asked, and I could tell he had reached his own conclusion about the answer to that question. I responded, “Count the women in the classroom.” He did, and it dawned on him that it was easier to learn twenty names (the number of women in the class) than forty (the number of men). His leer disappeared, and he seemed satisfied with my answer.
The way I am conducting my classroom perhaps benefits women and Black students more than others in the classroom. But research and my experience tell me that this learning environment is the best for improving the physics learning of all of the students in the class – nobody is being held back because of the style of instruction of the class.
Here are two more concrete questions:
Is the Studio Physics Program (what we call the program of classroom instruction like mine in SCALE-UP classrooms) on the list of woke programs that Florida State University submitted to the Chancellor of the State University System this week? The governor’s office asked for such lists from each university, and they are due in the governor’s office next week. Presumably they will be used to make adjustments to the allocations for each university listed in budget that the governor will submit to the legislature shortly. The Studio Physics Program is probably not on that list, although I’m not sure I would have been told if it were.
Will one or more of my majority students complain to somebody in a position of power that my classroom is woke? According to lots of research (and once again, my own experience) all groups of students in the class learn more (on the average – individual learning varies) in a studio-style classroom. But students don’t necessarily perceive that they are learning more, and in fact sometimes they resent being in a classroom environment that doesn’t include the entertaining lectures that they often experience in other courses. This isn’t just my impression. In 2019, researchers at Harvard published an often-cited study of two physics courses – one using an active learning pedagogy and the other a traditional lecture model. Students in the active learning class learned more than students in the traditional lecture class (as documented using a well-validated assessment instrument). But when the students were asked how much they had learned, the students in the lecture class said they had learned a lot, while the students in the active learning class reported they had learned little. Student impressions of how well they had learned were exactly the opposite of the reality of their learning. The title of this paper “Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom”, is precious all by itself.
So the complaint that I am keeping students from learning well because I insist on using a woke pedagogy is not beyond the realm of possibility, even though the reality is exactly the opposite. But I’m not losing sleep over this. Not yet, anyway.
I don’t know if what I’m doing in my classroom is considered woke, although of course every individual likely has a different definition of the word. What I am trying to do is treat all of my students with the dignity they are entitled to, simply because they are human beings. Heck, I even silently pray for my students before class most days.
Perhaps I don’t always seem compassionate. An administrator in our university’s teaching enhancement office once told me that I am brilliant but that I lack compassion. I responded that while I may lack compassion, I am certainly not brilliant.
But I probably am vulnerable to the charge that I am a woke physics professor. I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, and deal with that situation if it ever arises.
Bridge to Tomorrow 