written by Abigail R. Daane and Vashti Sawtelle

In a typical introductory college calculus-based physics course for future scientists and engineers, the makeup of the classroom resembles the physics community: few women and even fewer underrepresented minorities. This lack of representation is well known, but is rarely an explicit topic of conversation in physics courses. In an introductory physics course at Seattle Pacific University, we facilitated activities aimed to raise student awareness about demographic disparity between the physics community and the general population. Students had the opportunity to discuss and reflect about what it means to do physics, who does it, and why particular groups of people are not proportionally represented in the field. In this presentation, we share a portion of these activities and our preliminary findings about the impact of and response to these activities.

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Last Modified December 26, 2016

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