FOUR COMPETING THREADS IN THE DISCOURSE ON MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS PEDAGOGY

If you you don't know, and you know that you don't know, then well-known methods of Instruction guarantee that you can learn. If you you don't know, and you don't know that you don't know, because what you think that you know is wrong, then well-known methods of Instruction fail, and the student must be “deprogrammed” from the incorrect learning that blocks successful Instruction.

This paper considers that the fundamental importance of Pedagogy is to optimize the assessment of whether the student knows what he or she does not know. Alternatively, following Assessment, the teacher may “satisfice” – decide that more information about the student's knowledge and meta-knowledge might lead to better education, but comes with a cost of gathering information, and thus the teacher may begin Instruction with a “good enough but not perfect” awareness of the student's preparedness. That is, an Information Theory model of the stakeholders in Education (Teacher, Student, Parents, Administration, Peers, Community including potential employers) can be shown in the dynamics and structure of discourse in theoretical physics.

These three authors, on the dynamics and structure of discourse in theoretical physics, have shown, in previous publication (1) that "limits of physics" are in a very important way determined by the conceptual framework and language of discourse that we use to describe physical reality. In this ICER paper we examine three areas where the structure of discourse has been particularly difficult, with examples.