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 each the physics culture is transmitted and taught to students, mostly in implicit ways. In order to achieve this aim, this study will follow how meanings related to physics and physicists are part of everyday practices in and out of classrooms spaces.

The project focuses on the perspectives of student teachers as it enables one to examine the way student teachers relate to the physics culture in roles of student and teacher. Hence, this ethnograph-ic project will follow student teachers in their physics education at a selected university and later at their practice training at different upper-secondary schools. By looking at how the student teachers both learn and teach the physics culture in relation to other individuals, this study wants to bring to the fore the ways that the student teachers reproduce the exclusionary aspects of the physics culture, but also in which ways they challenge it and start creating more inclusive practices in physics culture.