Them: "What do you do?"
Me: "I'm a physics professor."
Them: "Oh, I was always so bad at physics!" or "It's so hard!" or "You must be so smart!"
I've had too many versions of this conversation to count, and they leave me disappointed that so many people's exposure to physics left them feeling worse for the experience. So how do we construct classes and train teachers so that I hear more responses like "Oh, physics is so beautiful!" or "I love physics! It's so useful!"? In doing this, I hope that more students who never even asked or were asked if they could do (much less enjoy!) physics will become confident viewing the world through the lens of physics, and that more curious minds will be able to use, enjoy, and benefit from physics. My teaching philosophy is grounded in creating an inclusive, supportive environment with the ultimate goal of making physics accessible and enjoyable, placing the tools and ways of knowing that are particular to physics in the hands of all of our students.
In the classroom. I often talk about the "journey to academic adulthood": early in your educational career, someone tells you what to know, how to learn it, and how to tell if you have you've learned it. At some point, we should be able to do and assess all three of those on our own, but we're rarely explicitly taught how. This journey provides a framework for my courses, labs, and curriculum.
I tell my introductory students that physics is "the science of trying to understand the universe from the smallest set of testable principles." They are often shocked when I claim that first semester physics will really only cover approximately 10 basic ideas, but I lay these ideas out at the beginning, and apply them consistently to proteins pulling on DNA, to ice cubes melting in a glass of water, to Vera Rubin's original insights into dark matter and to the cloud chamber I bring into class to reveal cosmic ray muons.
I typically start class with short discussions punctuated by clicker questions and think-pair-share activities before moving to in-depth problems, discussion, and short lectures. I use context-rich problems to find the physics in real world situations, apply general physics principles, and assess the results: instead of starting with "a block of wood is sliding down a 3° slope with ...", in-class groups play the role of an insurance adjuster looking at skid marks in an accident scene. 2nd-semester students are exposed to primary literature when they figure out inkjet printers can be used to print charged DNA onto substrates.
Introductory physics students are faced with the daunting task of correcting deeply-held misconceptions about how the universe works. For instance, many students come into class thinking that, when they're walking across a room from left to right, the frictional force on their foot is pointing from right to left. We start with discussions and demonstrations (force tables, etc.) to build up concepts and break down misconceptions. Then we do real-world examples with numbers. Then we ask about frictional forces between molecules in the cell, learning that physics can teach us about things we can't see directly.
Upper-level students move farther through the "journey to academic adulthood." For example, I have designed our sophomore-level Mathematical Methods class both to provide specific mathematical preparation that students need in upper-level courses, and to develop the students' agency as physicists via presentations and a significant independent project. I often introduce Noether's Theorem when we talk about beauty in physics. Many of my course materials are available on github.
In fact, all of my intermediate and advanced courses involve a significant independent project to help students discern their own interest and figure out how to learn something new. Project presentations teach the students about science communication, and provide an easy focus on how to tell (and help them tell) if they've really learned something. For example, Fast Fourier Transforms are a common project topic in Math Methods, and projects typically involve interpreting an FFT or wavelet transform of a student's favorite song. Peer grading and flexible office hours empower students to own their learning in my introductory and advanced classes.
PER tells us that student outcomes are improved by including modern research in the classroom. I do this in each and every one of my classes, and use some of my own research in the introductory series and in statistical and thermal physics. In thermal, I use a standard text (Schroeder), but add material on biomolecular systems and simulations. We discuss modern topics like the fluctuation theorems and the Jarzynski equality. I have taught stat mech at an intermediate and advanced level, and some of my intermediate-level course materials are available on github. I often develop Python (Jupyter) notebooks to explain tricky concepts, such as this one regarding surfaces and mappings in differential geometry for one of my upper-level courses. I plan to incorporate examples from Māori culture into the class's next iteration based on conversations with Māori cultural leaders during an experiential education based, off-campus semester program I co-led in 2019.
In order to bring broader perspectives and expertise to the classroom, I have co-taught courses within the core curriculum and partnered with faculty outside of the department for cross-disciplinary courses. I have co-taught courses with the purpose of being mentored, mentoring others, and providing collaborative space for major curricular innovation. Each of these experiences has been rewarding and I would welcome similar opportunities in the future.
In the lab. Physics is an experimentally-grounded science, and labs should be included in as many courses as possible, either as separate lab components, or as in-class labs. My introductory labs are shaped by comments we heard at ALPhA's Conference on Laboratory Instruction Beyond the First Year: industry and graduate schools are frustrated when physics majors demonstrate technical proficiency, but cannot ask and answer their own questions in a laboratory setting. Teaching our students to ask and answer their own questions means caring about language (e.g. I focus on uncertainty and data visualization in the first intro physics lab). Making space for inquiry-based learning means removing some content from both lectures and labs, but this also provides opportunities: some topics, such as buoyancy, can be treated primarily in lab. Moving them to lab makes space in the lecture schedule and helps to focus the lab on inquiry. I design fun, engaging labs: we bake custard to demonstrate phase transitions in an introductory lab, and my thermal physics students have teamed up with a biochemical microscopy lab at South Dakota State University to generate and analyze 2D membrane diffusion data.
Specific Courses. I have taught introductory, intermediate, and upper-level courses across our curriculum, including non-majors and off-campus courses. I am excited to contribute across the curriculum. In particular, I love teaching the introductory sequence, our sophomore-level math methods class, and statistical and thermal physics. In terms of non-core-curriculum, I have taught biophysics at both an intermediate and advanced level. In Fall 2024, I redesigned it as an introductory biomedical engineering course which could also serve a core role in bringing modern statistical analysis directly into a physics curriculum. I would love to teach an Introductory Physics for Life Sciences (IPLS) sequence (in fact, I designed one that ran here for a year before staffing constraints forced us to cancel it!). I would be delighted to teach computational biology. I have taught computational science and computational modeling. I enjoy designing labs for upper-level theory and lab courses in addition to introductory courses. Finally, I find it fulfilling to teach courses for non-majors, including a popular Science and Pseudoscience class that used Randall Munroe's "What If?" as a main text and led to public student presentations on topics from climate change to astrology.
These days, Earlham asks us to put our course materials on Moodle, so Earlham students can find relevant material there.
Personally, I keep a lot of my course material on my github site, though I make absolutely no claim that it's organized for anyone other than me. I regularly teach Introductory Physics, and I have created some tools and activities that make it easy to decolonise a syllabus. I teach our sophomore-level Mathematical Methods of Physics and Engineering class most years, and I teach our Statistical and Thermal Physics class every other year. Some of my Biophysics and Science and Pseudoscience materials are online, though most of the more recent material is on Moodle.