Laurie McNeil, Chair Elect – Forum on Education, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

The Forum on Education Program Committee has completed its work selecting the sessions for the March Meeting March 4-8, 2019 in Boston, MA and the April Meeting April 13-16, 2019 in Denver, CO. The Chair Elect of the Forum on Education is the chair of the Program Committee. The Program Committee has developed two great sets of sessions which should be of interest to a broad audience at each meeting.

As Program Chair, I would like to thank the committee for all their hard work putting together these sessions. This year’s Program Committee included Forum on Education Executive Committee members Chuhee Kwon (for the second year in a row!) and Beth Lindsay, Gordon Ramsey representing the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), Don Lincoln representing the Forum for Outreach and Engaging the Public, and Monica Plisch representing APS. Other members included Barbara Whitten, Jennifer Blue, Peggy Cebe, and Tim McKay. The committee worked closely with Larry Engelhardt and Dimitri Dounas-Frazer of AAPT and with Paula Heron from the Topical Group on Physics Education Research to co-organize sessions at the April meeting. Informal invitations have gone out to the speakers who will soon receive a formal invitation from the APS, so a speaker list cannot be announced at this time. However, session titles can be announced.

APS March Meeting, March 4-8, 2019 in Boston, MA

Session 1 – Jonathan F. Reichert and Barbara Wolff-Reichert Award for Excellence in Advanced Laboratory Instruction This session will feature the Reichert Award recipient and other speakers discussing how to incorporate state-of-the-art research into advanced laboratory instruction. The session is co-sponsored by the Division of Condensed Matter Physics.

Session 2 – Creating Inclusive Environments in Which to Work and Learn (co-sponsored by the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics) This session will feature speakers discussing the recent report on sexual harassment issued by the National Academies, effective practices for inclusion in undergraduate education and industry, and creating environments where women of color can thrive.

Session 3 – Live Long and Prosper as a Physicist, Innovator and Entrepreneur This session on entrepreneurship education in physics, co-sponsored by the Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics, will feature talks about the APS-PIPELINE project, financing and intellectual property for physicist entrepreneurs, and education for entrepreneurship.

Session 4 – Launching a Successful Career as a Physicist will feature speakers in data science, patent law, physics teaching and finance. It is co-sponsored by the Forum on Graduate Student Affairs and is particularly appropriate for the many student (graduate and undergraduate) attendees at the meeting.

Session 5 – Life, the Universe, and Everything: Teaching Biology to Physicists and Physics to Biologists This session addresses interdisciplinary education at the boundary between physics and biology, at the undergraduate and graduate levels. It will feature speakers from Princeton’s Integrated Science Curriculum, Univ. of California – San Diego’s Quantitative Biology program, and the biophysics program in the physics department at Georgetown. Also speaking will be an author of biophysics textbooks and an architect of the Living Physics Portal of biophysics instructional materials.

Session 6 – The Role of Physics Departments in Educating Teachers The critical role that physics departments can play in alleviating the severe shortage of qualified high school physics teachers will be addressed by speakers in this session. It will include an overview of the problem and the myths that physics students might believe about the teaching career path as well as examples of successful teacher preparation programs and what contributes to their success.

In addition to these invited sessions there will also be a Focus Session co-organized with the Division of Computational Physics on Education and Modern Computation. Forum members (and others) are encouraged to contribute abstracts for talks to be presented in this session.

APS April Meeting, April 13-16, 2019 in Denver, CO

Session 1 – Forum on Education Excellence in Physics Education Award This session will open with a presentation by the award recipient and include other talks related to the work for which the award is presented.

Session 2 – Critical examination of the relationships among reasoning, intuition, and conceptual understanding in physics This session, which is co-sponsored by the Topical Group on Physics Education Research, will explore the interplay of “thinking” and “feeling” in conceptual understanding of physics and how students develop intuition about physics.

Session 3 – Calling all physics teachers: It is time to integrate computation into your courses! AAPT co-organized this session with the Forum on Education, and it is co-sponsored by the APS Division of Computational Physics. Speakers will explore the need for computation in physics courses as well as examples of ways in which this can be done.

Session 4 – Engaging Students in Authentic Experimentation During Laboratory Courses This is the second session co-organized with AAPT for the April meeting, and it will focus on examples of project-based learning in laboratory courses and what physics education research has to say about it.

Session 5 – Teaching Energy in the 21st Century This session will include presentations on how the teaching of energy in physics can impact learning in chemistry, pedagogical content knowledge for teaching energy, and ontologies for energy.

Session 6 – Stereotype Threat: What It Is and What to Do About It Speakers in this session will explore how stereotype threat (the predicament in which people feel themselves to be at risk of conforming to stereotypes about their social group) affects education in physics.

We hope that members of the Forum who attend the March and April APS meetings will come to hear the many excellent invited speakers in these exciting sessions. We hope to see you there!

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.