Professor David Brookes
California State University, Chico
Sensemaking: From social positioning to gesture
Location: 4138 Physics Research Building
Faculty Host: Geraldine Cochran
Abstract: When students learn physics, one of the activities they engage in is “sensemaking.” In my research, I study times when students engage in sensemaking. I try to answer questions such as: What are students making sense of? And what are the variables that facilitate or impede their sensemaking? In my talk I will present two views of sensemaking, a social view and a cognitive view. In the social view, I will present data that suggest that the way that groups students position themselves in their discussions can open or close the collaborative space to sensemaking and productive learning. In the cognitive view, I will discuss the role of representational resources (language, diagrams, equations etc.) and the challenge that students face of connecting these representational resources to the physical reality that they represent. I will propose a hypothesis, that gesture is how students build a bridge between physical reality and the representations of reality that they learn in physics. I will present data that supports this hypothesis and discuss the broader implications for how physics education research can be used to design learning environments that support our students’ efforts to learn physics.
Bio: David Brookes was born in Durban, South Africa. He did his undergraduate degree in physics and applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town and completed a M.Sc. in theoretical physics before moving to the U.S. to read for a Ph.D. in physics at Rutgers University in New Jersey. There his met his dissertation advisor, Prof. Eugenia Etkina, and discovered his true academic calling: physics education research (PER). At Rutgers, he contributed to the development and implementation of Prof. Etkina’s Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE). David is currently a professor of physics at California State University, Chico, specializing in PER.
David’s research follows two strands:
1. He is interested in cognitive linguistics and embodied cognition. He uses this general framework to understand how physics students use and make sense of the representational resources they encounter in the physics classroom, particularly language and physics equations.
2. David is interested in designing learning environments so that foster student learning, and help physics students acquire scientific habits of mind and develop positive attitudes towards physics. In this vein, he studies how groups of students collaborate when they work together on open-ended physics activities and the role of social positioning in group effectiveness.
David Brookes sees his classroom as a place for transformation, both for himself and for his students. He envisions his teaching and research as two dimensions of the same activity: learning. His research informs his classroom practice and what he learns from his students informs his research.
