How Can the Learning of Physics Support the Construction of Students’ Personal Identities?

In public perception, the humanities (history, philosophy, art, and literature) still have a privileged role as subjects that can encourage students to develop their personal orientations and aesthetics. In contrast, physics and mathematics are school subjects that have been shown to put off many young people because of the strong image of authority they still maintain in which there is no place for arguments and personal views. In this paper, the following questions are considered: How can the learning of physics content support students in constructing their personal identities? Conversely, How does the search for a personal self-narrative influence students’ approaches to learning disciplinary content? The extended body of work I describe in this paper is based on a design experience on the topic of thermodynamics in a secondary school physics class (grade 12). This case is notable for investigating the previous questions since the students in this class came to appropriate, or make their own, the discourse of thermodynamics. That is, their conceptual understanding and disciplinary engagement were accomplished by a reflexive process of populating scientific discourse with personal intentions, purposes and tastes. With respect to this case, I will discuss possible connections between the specific model of educational reconstruction we used to design the teaching materials and the type of productive learning that sits at the nexus of disciplinary engagement and identity and that we have come to refer to as “appropriation.”