Results in physics education research as lenses for analyzing textbooks, recognizing critical details and fostering thinking. The case of teaching/learning special relativity

The teaching of special relativity, both at the secondary school level and at the university level, is still strongly influenced by the approach designed by Resnick in 1968. This approach follows in some way the 1905 original paper of Einstein on “The electrodynamics of moving bodies” and it is still orienting, more or less explicitly, textbooks’ authors. In this paper I analyze how the educational tradition progressively transformed the presentation of the theory, from the original article to the current textbooks. In particular, I will show how such a transformation has progressively disregarded both critical details needed for understanding, and that interpretative dimension needed for making the approach comparable to other possible ones and, hence, needed for perceiving the cultural meaning of the theory. The analysis is carried out using results in Physics Education Research (PER) as lenses and it is intended to provide teachers with tips for reading in the lines of textbooks and for recognizing some implicit interpretative choices.