Séance Séminaire

From University Mathematics to Mathematics Education

The interplay between Mathematics and Physics in secondary teacher-students education: activities and research developed within an interdisciplinary research team

Since 2014, in collaboration with a small group of researchers in Physics and Mathematics education and teachers-researchers (led by Prof. Olivia Levrini), I have been investigating the issues arisen by interdisciplinarity in secondary teaching, with particular attention to high school. The main motivations were the well-known difficulties emerged in research in physics education due to mathematics and the feeling that the research in didactics of these two disciplines had much more in common than it was actually represented in research and institutions in Italy. In the Italian context these connections are even more important to explore since teachers with a background in mathematics or physics can teach both disciplines at secondary school and the mathematical curriculum includes explicitly interactions with physics. Discussing and exploring the existing literature we realized that the main limitation of the existing studies was the “deformation” of the main aims and values of the other discipline once the issue of interdisciplinarity was formulated in a disciplinary way (Physics in Mathematics or Mathematics in Physics). This phenomenon affects also the teacher-students in the Klein's second transition, since they are taught in institutional contexts where epistemologies and identities of discipline were conceived as clearly separated in teaching (in particular at the university) and often the interdisciplinarity that characterizes the discipline at the research level are not presented to Bachelor or Master students. Teacher-students education is thus a key action to reach innovation. We designed activities for teacher-students implemented in courses attended by students with a background in both disciplines and carried out research starting from our implementations. In 2019 we developed an international research project with the Universities of Montpellier, Crete and Barcelona, that was funded by the Erasmus project, enlarging the perspective to an international context. In this contribution I will resume the main issues, the theoretical framework and some examples of design, implementation and analysis of modules for teacher-students, facing in particular the issue of Klein's second transition.