Session S04: Mini-Symposium: Physics Education Research Related to Departmental Culture and Change

Using the EP3 Guide as a call for education research on systemic change

The Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) Initiative has created the EP3 Guide (ep3guide.org), a research-based community-built collection of practices and strategies for physics programs. The research base of the guide builds heavily on the results of physics education research (PER), and creating the guide has shown opportunities to expand our knowledge. Where the PER community originally focused on fostering student learning in the classroom, a growing trend over several decades has been to study systemic issues that help (or hinder) student learning. The EP3 Guide provides direction for these PER studies. As faculty and departments use the EP3 Guide to address challenges, they may seek to, for example, increase enrollments, reform instruction, address problems of culture and climate, and become more equitable and inclusive. Studying the processes by which these changes play out requires careful observation and investigation as well as documentation and dissemination. The results of the research can then modify, extend, and strengthen the guide, allowing it to be a living document that is designed to change over time. Research on departmental change with participants of the Departmental Action Leadership Institutes (DALI) in the EP3 Initiative has made steps in this direction, but many other opportunities exist. This talk will describe the EP3 Guide, provide a brief overview and history of physics education research, and will then provide some examples of how the PER community can use the EP3 Guide to advance its goal of studying teaching and learning within complex academic systems and structures.   

Investigating students' change agency in teams through a relational lens

As the Physics community pursues change work that aims to improve departments and create more equitable learning environments, it is important that these efforts are approached by teams with diverse stakeholders who can inform the change. Students bring an expertise of their own educational experiences. When students participate in these teams, it becomes imperative that the physics community investigates how students build their own sense of agency and the ways they create the capacity for change within these teams. We aim to capture the ways that agency occurs in the interaction within these teams. We use the lens of Relational Agency to interpret student experiences. In this talk, I illustrate how Relational Agency illuminates the ways in which students exercise agency in social interactions through two examples from different team contexts. One from a student leadership team within the Access Network, and a second from a departmental action team. Through these two examples, I illustrate how taking an interactional framing of agency helps identify essential features of change teams that support centering students. This talk will provide directions for continued research into student agency in change work and offer suggestions for partnering with students in future efforts.   

Ethnographic investigations of the emerging culture on departmental teams: Evidence of transforming physics faculty's practices and values around departmental change

Many organizations and researchers within the physics community have highlighted the need to improve undergraduate programs in areas such as pedagogy and recruitment and retention of marginalized students. As these reforms often pose challenges and require additional resources, initiatives such as the Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI) have been developed. In these investigations of this institute, we developed case studies of five DALI physics programs. We document the dominant and emerging cultures around how physics faculty approach and pursue change work. We see evidence of DALI participants' growing awareness of taken-for-granted assumptions about educational change processes within their departmental cultures and coming to recognize and value alternative ways of collaborating and enacting change in their local contexts. For example, we found that while faculty in the department typically approach change work in a rushed and ad-hoc way, ignoring the use of formal evidence, DALI faculty participants take a deliberate and strategic approach to departmental change, centering formal evidence. In this talk, I will show how the emerging micro-culture is situated within the dominant departmental culture around educational change and discuss implications for practice.   

Exploring the Historic Origin of Cultural Gatekeeping in Physics Education

Culture in departments is rooted in history; by analyzing the historical culture of physics departments, we may come to a new understanding of attitudes, unspoken assumptions, and ideas that permeate contemporary culture. Here, we examine the evolution of the idea that physics education should serve as a filter, a practice commonly called gatekeeping. Physics graduate education saw great reform throughout the early and mid-20^th century, with many calls to organize and standardize the disordered, haphazard system that was present. Concerns were voiced about the education process and the quality of the students who were granted degrees. These calls to reform resulted in a variety of changes that were designed around the needs of the student body at the time. In the present, our field is more diverse than ever before, and our current standards and expectations fail to support these learners. However, this failure is often seen as the student's failure rather than the system design's failure. This project analyzes gatekeeping through 20^th-century calls for reform, and, using social dominance theory and the concept of legitimizing myths, argues that modern policies that disadvantage minoritized students are kept around due to a perceived need to gatekeep the subject.   

Oral candidacy exams: An investigation of student perspectives

Candidacy exams are required of all graduate programs. However, the format and scope of candidacy exams differs from one department to the next. Literature on the purpose, format, and efficacy of candidacy exams is scarce.  Our study seeks to contribute to the body of literature on candidacy exams in physics. In this phenomenological study, we are interested in the perspective of those who are most impacted by candidacy exams: the students taking them. To narrow the scope of our study, we focus particularly on oral candidacy exams. We utilize social developmental network theory in the conceptual framework for our study. Developmental networks are groups of people who take an active interest in and action toward advancing a protégé’s career. In this work we will investigate what developmental networks or groups of people support graduate students through the process of preparing for and completing oral candidacy exams. Preliminary results based on one-one-one semi-structured interviews will be presented.    

Finding a research group increases sense of belonging, but struggling to find a group increases likelihood of attrition

High attrition in physics graduate education is an ongoing problem. As the population of physics PhD students grows larger and more diverse, investigating the underlying factors that drive students to leave their programs is imperative. Here, we explore how the process of finding and joining a research group impacts retention and leaving in physics graduate education. Semi-structured interviews with 20 first and second-year physics PhD students reveal that students who are able to immerse themselves in a positive research environment report increased sense of belonging in their programs, whereas students who struggle to find a group are more likely to feel isolated and consider leaving. Despite the impact of successfully joining a group, students often perceive a lack of guidance from their department regarding how to navigate that process. Moreover, they characterize coursework (the most familiar and structured component of the graduate school experience) as a barrier to their search. Since students with a higher sense of belonging are more likely to persist, our results suggest that formal departmental structures to more fairly and equitably support early involvement in research may offer a means for physics graduate programs to improve retention.