Abstract
This chapter reports on research featuring three women physics majors of color who had generally positive things to say about their experiences in physics. This chapter presents data that helps us to understand the physics identity which is available in a setting where women of color feel particularly successful, and how that identity is accessible to women of color. Drawing on intersectionality theory and utilizing a Patricia Hill Collins’ Domains-of-Power Framework, this chapter considers how identities of successful women physics majors of color align with or how they contest wider patterns in physics and in society.
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Notes
- 1.
Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are institutions of higher education in the U.S. that were founded before the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964. Before this legislation, many U.S. higher education institutions were not open to Black students; HBCUs were founded to provide Black students with access to university educations. Although HBCUs are now technically integrated, they still have the education of Black students as their primary mission.
- 2.
Note that professor is the standard term for any US academic faculty member; thus it is used throughout the quotes in this chapter to denote anyone with an advanced degree teaching a physics class.
- 3.
A student who had transferred from a large research intensive university talked explicitly about the non-competitive atmosphere in this physics setting: “The relationship you have with teachers here is worth noting. They want physics majors, and the teachers want you to learn and understand the stuff. At [my previous institution] you’re competing against other students for the curve – you do really well and you hope other people don’t understand it as well as you so the curve is in your favor. Teachers there, they know a third of you are going to fail no matter what. Here they really want you to understand it.”
- 4.
The Force Concept Inventory is a multiple choice test that assesses a student’s conceptual understanding of force and Newton’s Laws. When the FCI was first introduced, physics teachers and professors across the US (and I count myself in this number) were horrified to discover that some of their students could solve physics problems proficiently while still holding utterly wrong beliefs about how the world works – they had learned to solve problems but hadn’t actually learned physics. This physics department uses the FCI not to assess students but to measure their own effectiveness – they administer it at the beginning of the introductory course and again at the end to see whether their teaching approaches were effective in helping students identify and correct their misconceptions about force. Since the development of the FCI, a number of similar tests have come into use; see for instance https://www2.ph.ed.ac.uk/AardvarkDeployments/Public/60100/views/files/ConceptualTests/Deployments/ConceptualTests/deploymentframeset.html
- 5.
He is referring to the study by Leslie, Cimpian, Meyer and Freeland (Leslie et al. 2015) that showed that the under-representation not only of women but also of African Americans was tightly correlated to the perception by people in a particular field of the importance of natural ability to success in that field.
- 6.
The first Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics took place at the University of Southern California in 2006. Since then the number of conference locations has grown annually; in 2018 there were 9 conferences held simultaneously at different locations throughout the US and, for the first time, one in Canada as well.
- 7.
Of the 6283 people who received bachelor’s degrees in physics in 2014 across the entire United States, for instance, 81 were Latinas, 52 were African American women and 5 were America Indian women (National Science Foundation and National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics 2017).
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Johnson, A. (2020). An Intersectional Physics Identity Framework for Studying Physics Settings. In: Gonsalves, A.J., Danielsson, A.T. (eds) Physics Education and Gender. Cultural Studies of Science Education, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41933-2_4
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