Everyday Practices of the Physics Culture: Production and Negotiation of Student Teachers’ Subjectivities in Physics.

The aim of my PhD is to examine how student teachers of physics create and negotiate subjectivities in relation to the physics culture both as students and as teachers and to identify how this process reproduces and/or challenges social inequalities. The purpose of this study is to identify teaching practices that enable more students to perceive themselves as prospective successful physicists. This is done through an ethnographical study of how everyday social practices inform student teachers subjectivities. Furthermore, my project traces the student teachers' practices from their education to their work environment, with the intention of bridging the knowledge of how these supposedly separate practices are, in fact, interconnected.

Researchers have identified that physics has it is own culture, with specific rituals, shared norms and practices that, to a high extent, reflect the perspectives of privileged groups in society in terms of factors such as ethnicity, race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, disabilities and others. Therefore, when students learn about physics, they also learn normative ideas about who physicists are, who belongs and who does not belong in it. This project aims to study the process by which the physics culture is transmitted and taught to students, mostly in implicit ways. In order to achieve this aim, this ethnographic study follows student teachers in their physics education at a selected university and later at their practice training at different upper-secondary schools, since they constantly switch between the roles of student and teacher in physics. By looking at how the student teachers both learn and teach the physics culture, this study wants to bring to the fore the ways that the exclusionary aspects of the physics culture are reproduced but also how they are challenged, thus identifying more inclusive practices in physics culture.