Physics in K-12 Integrated Science Curricula

Abstract

Recent policy documents of K-12 education suggest two organizing principles for an integrated curriculum: Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs) that define the main principles and corresponding concepts of a discipline, and Crosscutting Concepts (CCCs) that promote connections between the seemingly disparate scientific topics. This chapter employs a content-oriented perspective to examine these two organizing principles from the standpoint of physics education. First, we address the DCI of electrostatic interactions, traditionally considered “bound” to a physics context and rarely activated by learners in other domains, to show how to make a physics DCI more relevant to other disciplines. Second, we examine how introducing the concept of energy using a traditional physics definition may prevent its use as a CCC and suggest that a calorimetric definition is more likely to serve as a bridge between the meaning of energy in physics and in other disciplines. Finally, we discuss how an integrated curriculum can reshape the traditional focus of physics teaching and its epistemic goals. We suggest that physics taught in an integrated curriculum can yield a richer account of physics-based reasoning that is aligned with the current practice of physicists that study complex systems in other disciplines such as biology or chemistry.