Taking on a new meaning of physics mathematization for teaching in teacher education processes

Abstract

This is a documented reflection that seeks to characterize an alternative conception of the ‘mathematization of physics for teaching’. The reflection was made on the academic production of the research group ‘Teaching and learning of physics’. This group has posed a sequence of research questions has been raised to find out how physics teachers understand the relationship between physics and mathematics in the physics teaching process. In 2003 they studied the idea of ‘mathematical beauty’ in the early days of quantum mechanics, suggesting that there would be a difference between the way scientists assume the physical/mathematical relationship and the way physics is taught. In 2010, they wondered if there would be research in this field that would allow transformations in teaching focused on equations as the set of mathematical–physical relationships, finding that there are at least three trends. In 2019, they verified that despite the research in the literature, many students continue with the same reductionist idea about this relationship. In 2020, they made a proposal, showing a possibility of educating the teacher’s thinking for new understandings in this regard. The main conclusion is that it is possible to develop mathematization processes in the classroom from three specific phases that educate scientific thinking. The first phase tries to make the student aware of the existence of phenomenology and describe it. The second phase educates the study of nature in a systematic way, building the meaning of the organization of a physical system. The third phase promotes explanation and argument so that students achieve an explanatory model. These phases are configured as a criterion to guide the sequence of activities in a class, a set of classes or a complete course and have been worked on and tested in ‘physics didactics’ courses in a physics teacher training course.