It’s Hard to Talk About Inclusion in Physics Classrooms. Meet the Physicists Making Inroads.

Marty Baylor, a physics professor at Carleton College, chaired the APS Committee on Education during the turbulence of COVID-19 lockdowns and the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. In addition to discussing how best to support virtual teaching, committee members raised another concern: Issues related to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) were cropping up in physics classrooms.

Many physics educators wanted to respond to these issues, but they didn’t know how and feared causing more harm. Baylor calls them the “willing but hesitant.” She gets it. Most physicists aren’t trained to deal with challenging dynamics like these in the classroom.

“I care about [EDI] issues, and I’ve read about them, and I’ve tried to incorporate them in my teaching,” says Teresa Herd, a physics professor at Assumption University. But when faced with a disparaging comment about women in physics or professors with accents, she, like many others, felt lost, she says. “There was this ‘freeze’ moment. What do I do? What should I do? What can I do?”

To address such questions, in 2021 Baylor created the APS EDI Fellows Program with co-PIs Jesús Pando, a physics professor at DePaul University, and Peggy O'Neill, a social scientist from Smith College. With a grant from the APS Innovation Fund, which sponsors collaborative projects that advance physics, the team set out to teach a cohort of fellows, all physics educators, how to engage with EDI issues, and then design a workshop with them and train the cohort to present it to other physics educators.

Over two years, six fellows participated in regular training sessions, digging deep into issues like cultural competence, identity, and power dynamics with social scientists before turning their attention to developing the workshop. The social scientists “were great at moving us outside of our physics perspective,” says Herd, who became an APS EDI fellow. In turn, they learned about the physics culture and its nuances.

“We physicists like to pretend what happens outside of the classroom stays outside of the classroom — that issues of race and gender and whatever political climate is happening, if there’s a war, if there’s a mass shooting, or whatever, that has no effect on what’s happening in our classrooms,” says Beatriz Burrola Gabilondo, a physics lecturer at the Ohio State University. But from personal experience, she says, that’s not true.

Once, she says, a usually friendly and engaged student came to class withdrawn and upset. Afterward, he told Burrola Gabilondo that he had just lost his best friend to suicide. She felt helpless. “There is this opportunity for me as a teacher, as a person in a position of authority, as a person in a position that can help, and I don’t have the tools,” she remembers thinking. She decided to find those tools, starting on a path that would lead her to become an APS EDI fellow.

Personal tragedies, pandemics, and nationwide protests aren’t the only outside forces that impact physics students. “There are identity-based issues in the classroom happening all the time,” Pando says. Sometimes they’re recognizable, like comments that reinforce stereotypes, but not always. After Pando took a class through the ballistic pendulum problem, in which a bullet is fired into a suspended wooden block, a student told him that it had been difficult to concentrate on the physics given the recent violence in their neighborhood.

Pando acknowledges that instructors can’t “understand and adapt to the entire classroom of lived experiences,” but says it’s important to be aware of identity-based issues in the classroom and have practical tools to handle them.

Those are key aspects of the team’s new interactive workshop on engaging with EDI in the physics classroom. It’s the first of its kind in physics, a field that some argue has struggled to embrace EDI as wholeheartedly as many in the humanities and social sciences.

“We tend to look at our humanities colleagues and say, ‘That’s where you talk about it,’” says Kelley Sullivan, a professor at Ithaca College and APS EDI fellow. She disagrees. “Students in our department need to know that we care about them as whole people,” she says.

Pando concurs. “If your goal is to be a great lecturer and then walk out of that class, then maybe it doesn’t matter,” he says. “But if your goal is to help students thrive and succeed, it’s probably important to pay attention to these kinds of issues.”

The team has piloted the workshop for select groups of physicists and integrated their feedback. This summer, Baylor submitted an NSF IUSE (Improving Undergraduate STEM Education) proposal to expand the workshop, bring it to the wider physics community, and train additional cohorts of leaders. The team hopes their workshop for physicists and by physicists will draw many of the willing but hesitant.

“We are applying for funding, but we have the fellows. We have the workshop,” says Baylor. If you want to get involved now, reach out, she adds. “We’re ready to go.”