Fostering Disciplinary Literacy? South African Physics Lecturers' Educational Responses to their Students' Lack of Representational Competence

Abstract

Recently, the South African Institute of Physics undertook a major review of university physics education. The report highlighted the necessity for further transformation of the teaching of physics, particularly in relation to the teaching of under-prepared students.In this article we examine how physics lecturers in South Africa reported how they respond to the teaching challenges that they face in terms of representational competence. We argue that the goal of any undergraduate degree is the production of disciplinary literate graduates, where disciplinary literacy refers to the ability to competently deal with the various representational formats used within the discipline. For physics the development of disciplinary literacy involves competence in a wide range of representations, such as; written and oral languages, diagrams, graphs, mathematics, apparatus, simulations, etc.Our interest in this study was the way in which individual physics lecturers described how they deal with their students' lack of representational competence. To this end, we interviewed 20 physics lecturers from five purposefully selected representative South African universities about their students' lack of representational competence and the educational strategies they use for dealing with this problem. These interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed for potential patterns.Iterative, interpretive analysis resulted in the identification of six qualitatively different response strategies that South African physics lecturers indicate they invoke to deal with their students' lack of representational competence. We suggest that an understanding of this range of possible response strategies will allow physics lecturers to better understand their own responses and those of their peers, and that this, in turn, may lead to changes in educational practice.Based on the differences in individual response strategies that we find, we further argue that inter-and intra-faculty discussions about undergraduate disciplinary literacy goals have the distinct potential for reforming South African undergraduate physics. Here, we suggest that the disciplinary literacy discussion matrix that we used to initiate dialogue in our interviews may also double as a useful starting point for such faculty discussions.

Disciplinary discernment: Reading the sky in astronomy education

“…To learn to think like a scientist, the student needs to become fluent in their use of different resources through a process of repetition, by recursively revisit the same material or resources at an increasing level of detail [44]. Through this process the student learns to discern disciplinary affordances of a particular semiotic resource, hence building "representational competence" [45,46]. Taking this perspective, learning astronomy, or any science, "can now be framed as coming to discern the disciplinary affordances of semiotic resources" [47] (p. 20), what is referred to as disciplinary discernment [2].…”

Writing centres as dialogic spaces: Negotiating conflicting discourses around citation and plagiarism

“…Students who speak EAL are particularly vulnerable to the charge of plagiarism because they tend to patch-write more than first-language speakers (Pecorari 2003). This presents challenges in the South African context where EAL speakers make up the majority of the student body, and where sustained educational deprivation has led to a heritage of educational underpreparedness, especially in terms of language competence (Linder et al 2014). The absence of adequate institutional policies that take into account these challenges and accommodate students from disadvantaged backgrounds could perpetuate current inequalities.…”

Unpacking physics representations: Towards an appreciation of disciplinary affordance

“…For example, Meltzer [10] notes that "the instructor's view of the ease or difficulty of a particular representation in a particular context might not match the views of a large proportion of students" (p. 473). This inability of physics teachers to judge the difficulties that a given representation may pose for students has also been reported by other researchers [15,48,49]. In this respect, Northedge [50] claims that "[university teachers'] thoughts are so deeply rooted in specialist discourse that they are unaware that meanings that they take for granted are simply not construable from outside the discourse" (p. 256).…”