Creating sites of disciplinary knowledge: integrating physics and oral communication

Other conference contribution, 2019

The integration of physics with communication education has the potential to create a symbiotic relationship where students learn to communicate physics, while also communicating to learn physics. This paper presents pedagogical reflections from a first-year physics course combining the application of CAD, 3D-printing and oral communication. Students were tasked with conceiving, designing, and printing a plastic toy demonstrating a specific physical/mathematical phenomenon. Concurrently, the students prepared an A0-poster presentation focusing on the process from conception to finished toy, highlighting the physics and/or mathematics in question. Here, the teacher team discuss how the poster, the presentation, and the learning process leading up to it enabled students to co-construct “sites of disciplinary knowledge” and how, at a fundamental level, “the norms, epistemologies, and values” (Dannels, 2002, p. 256) of the physics discipline were appropriated by the students.

Dannels, D. (2002). Communication across the curriculum and in the disciplines: Speaking in engineering. Communication Education, 51(3), 254-268.