written by Edward F. Redish

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.

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Published August 24, 2010
Last Modified October 6, 2010

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