Pre-Service Elementary Teachers' Relationships to Physics and Physics Teaching

Notions related to physics in the Quebec Education Program are numerous. For example, it is expected that pupils from grades 1 to 6 study magnets, stars and galaxies, sources of energy, etc. In spite of these curricular demands, many pre-service elementary teachers have not studied notions related to physics since their 4^th year of high school (grade 10 in Quebec). Moreover, physics is often considered as a difficult, unattractive and less important subject both by students and teachers. Given this discrepancy between curricular demands and pedagogical expertise, I decided to study pre-service elementary teachers’ relationships to both physics and physics teaching as part of my master’s research (this research was a part of a wider project interested in profiling pre-service elementary teachers’ relationships to scientific knowledge and science teaching writ large). My participants consisted of 37 pre-service elementary teachers enrolled in a pre-university course of study in education. Participants were invited to complete a written questionnaire containing eight open-ended questions regarding their views on physics and physics teaching. For example, participants were invited to describe their physics learning experiences, to define their conception of physics and to identify those elementary schools subjects to which they were looking forward to teach and those they were least looking forward to teach. Eight participants also took part in a semi-structured individual interview that gave them the opportunity to precise, clarify and deepen their views about physics and physics teaching. My analysis shows that pre-service elementary teachers who took part in this study depicted various relationships to both physics and the teaching of physics. These relationships ranged from one of enthusiasm with respect to physics and physics teaching, to those of feeling intimidated and detached from physics and physics teaching. In many cases, participants’ relationships to physics were similar to their relationships to physics teaching, but not always. Sometimes participants’ relationships to physics were more positive than their relationships to physics teaching, whereas for other participants, it was the opposite situation that arose. These results indicate that pre-service teachers relationships to physics and physics teaching in elementary schools are often influenced by their previous learning experiences with respect to physics and by their perceptions that physics concepts taught in elementary schools are inherently difficult (or not) to understand.