Podcast #2: Magdalena Kersting: engaging students to science through Einstein

[Music] hi and this is the physics high podcast a quick quiz do you a want to be inspired by science communicators b want to learn all about science education c want guidance on your scientific journey well how about d or the above today my guest is dr magdalena kirsten now magdalena is a physics educator an educational researcher and a science communicator and currently is doing her post-doctoral research at the university of oslo in norway now she has a great passion for einsteinium physics and in particular general relativity but really what she's passionate about is communicating science make giving students a passion of science through the teaching of modern physics and in particular obviously einstein in physics now i had the pleasure of hearing her speak at the ligo conference last year and i got a taste of her passion her infectious personality that really is excited about educating and encouraging students to explore and chase their passion for science welcome magdalena thanks for thanks so much for having me and what a nice introduction it was from your website from from my readings of what you do you really have two big things that you are dealing with at the same time you have a passion for science education and educating others about the wonders of science and obviously you have a real interest in i'm studying in physics um could you tell the audience a little bit about what you do and uh in particular uh what you're currently doing with your post-doctoral research yeah absolutely and i think before i dive into my current activities at the university of oslo uh i just uh give you a little bit of my background an idea of uh the path that has led me to where i'm currently so by training i'm a mathematical physicist so i have studied physics and mathematics and i've always been fascinated by by abstract ideas and trying to understand the world at the universe what holds the universe together so studying physics and mathematics was just a no-brainer for me but there's something about science and scientific questions that um stretch your intellect and just yeah i don't know in a way make you excited about wanting to learn more and this excitement is something that i want to share with others so yeah being a science educator and a science communicator really combines the best of two worlds namely the world of science on one hand and the world of sharing this and helping others understand science as well and just sharing not only science but sharing um our excitement and just yeah wanting to to learn more and to grow and to to be critical and yeah so this is for me what i'm doing i'm involved in in many different activities but they all feel like they belong together and they're just different aspects of the same passion of of modern physics and of wanting to understand the world really and this is a little bit of my background so what i'm currently doing and what i have been doing for the past years is that i'm a physics and science education researcher and this means that i'm not only trying to educate others but i'm actually doing research on improving instructional strategies and this research for example entails developing learning resources so i have developed a digital learning environment about albert einstein's general theory of relativity with my colleagues at the university of oslo and we used these learning resources to then do research on students conceptions and teachers struggles and teachers opportunities when they try to bring these topics to the classroom so it is really an activity or my work entails developing learning resources working with teachers like you being in classrooms interviewing students um yeah analyzing video observations in my latest project we try to assess the quality of instructional practices in science classrooms so we have video observation manuals and it's a lot of activities really but the idea is how can we improve science education to give our audience a taste of basically what you do i recently read two papers of yours one about a more intuitive way of teaching how we know the existence of dark matter through the use of jelly if i might remember which i thought were very interesting um i've got already the ingredients ready to do that experiment myself and then you actually just published a paper just the last few days too particularly about misconceptions within time dilation can you tell us a little bit about that yeah of course and i'm really excited about this paper i think it got published like a week ago a couple of days ago and actually i'm i've written this with a colleague in melbourne so it's an australian colleague and yeah um ceo see and i um have really tried to unpack what's going on when we talk about a relativistic time dilation and usually we teach students or we we tell each other that time moves more slowly or more quickly depending on how slowly or quickly you move yourself but the way you're saying this um often leads to misconceptions and the general problem with relativity and trying to wrap your mind around relativity is that we don't really have an experience of relativistic phenomena and it's super hard to visualize how are you supposed to visualize time dilation what does it mean for time to to offer clocks to tick more slowly or more quickly depending on how fast you move and in this paper we draw a different or we we draw an important distinction between and between observing and measuring a relativistic phenomenon and this is really the idea because if you say running clocks move slow um you don't actually see the clocks ticking more slowly you don't see that you would measure it if you were to measure it as an observer and a critical notion here is the notion of an observer and here's a problem with language because like in everyday english we talk about an observer and students and everyone knows what an observer is but when we talk about an observer in special relativity or in relativity more generally and this has a really specific meaning and we shouldn't confuse the act of observing with just seeing something and seeing as photons sitting near a retina or like taking a picture of something and we um we try to yeah unpacked this issue of um observing and measuring and we um we introduced an instructional strategy that hopefully will help teachers um yeah avoid this confusion and give students vocabulary and terminology to avoid this conceptual confusion yeah i really enjoyed the article and i think that issue of language is a really important one it's not just about observing what an observer is um and i think it's other areas as well now for our members of our audience i'll publish a link for the article i think we could talk for ages about this but that's not the intent of this our chat but i'll put the link down the bottom and it really encouraged particularly for physics educators that you um that you have opportunity to look at it so magdalena back to the subject at hand which is really you what got you into science was it a seminal moment in your life that does switch things on or was it something that you've always been passionate about tell us a little bit how you got into science that's a great question and i think it actually was a seminal moment and my story is probably one that many people can relate to because as a child i always loved uh watching the night sky and it was this fascination with the stars and astronomy it really got me into to science but i in the beginning i didn't really relate like watching the the sky and pondering the universe um as a child to to science and just physics specifically and i remember i think on my 12th birthday maybe 13 but i was 12 or 13 years old and i got a birthday present and it was this huge astronomy picture book like an illustrated book of uh astronomy and i absolutely love this book paul like i would uh browse through it and it had this i was a little girl and it felt like this this book was huge probably half the size of me but it had these um fantastic illustrations and photographs of stars and galaxies and then little information text and i would read through it and i just completely fell in love and i just knew this was something that i wanted to do so it was really at this birthday present that got me excited and then from there i just fell down the rabbit hole i think i got stephen hawking's brief history of time and then i read brian crane and michio kaiku and all those um physicists and physics communicators and so i think at the age of 12 or 13 i just had uh set my mind on becoming a physicist and this is what i did a couple of years later and this is what i'm still passionate about and that passion comes through now um talking about um science education or science communication um i think we will both agree and most people agree the importance of having good science communication uh not only for students but at society at large too i guess how do you see your role in science communication what's your views on the importance of science communication whether it's close by or in a broader context in terms of society of course with my work i want to have an educational impact so it's one thing that i'm excited about these topics and i enjoy working on them and learning more about physics but of course i i want to have an impact with my artwork and i think science is awesome because science forces us to to reflect on our accents and it forces us to to think critically about facts and about theories and ideas so science gives us a playground to play with abstract ideas and to test hypotheses and to really become better thinkers in a way and be able to navigate this world i think at the end of the day it's really about navigating this world and making sense of this world and science is of course not our only playground and it's not our only approach to understanding the world but it's one that's a lot of fun and that really um brings us a long way and allows us to explore a lot so with science education and science communication i hope i can i can contribute to helping people understand the world a little bit better maybe become critical thinkers and being able to just see how much fun it is to continue to grow and learn not only as a student but we are lifelong learners right and i hope that with my work that i really can help others um see the beauty of science see the excitement and i don't really want to say become better human beings but in a sense yeah become better human beings and just um yeah keep keep learning keep growing you mentioned the importance of critical thinking we can probably see there's a lot of evidence of a reticence of people to be critical thinkers you see it in the media particularly and about the discussions on various social media um not an easy question but do you see [Music] we like difficult questions yeah that's right that's right so do you what do you see in terms of how do we how do we get people to be encouraged to do critical thinking to you know to to have more uh to have more considered opinions particularly i mean jeff i spoke to you last week of course and his particular uh concern is particularly in the field of climate science where there isn't a lot of critical thinking shown particularly within the you know society at large um do you have any thoughts of how we could possibly um combat that so okay i i will step back from the climate science and just talk a little bit more generally about critical thinking and scientific literacy because i think um a lot of my ideas and what i'm going to say um relates to different areas in science and different socio-scientific issues of course and yeah it's it is indeed a difficult a difficult question how we can write scientific literacy and how we can help people become critical thinkers in a way but also become active and participate because it's one it's one thing to be critical and it's easy to criticize right but it's a different thing to actually take actions and to participate in our society and try to make the world a better place it's not cliche but how can we try to instill that in our students and if i think about um scientific literacy because critical thinking is one part of this i am scientific literacy i usually think about three levels and this is this reflects in my educational pathway as well so first of all we have knowledge in science so knowing about scientific ideas and scientific theorems and scientific concepts really so this is our knowledge in science but then there's knowledge about science so you have to take a step back and reflect on the nature of science the nature of scientific knowledge how do we arrive at um at scientific ideas what are scientific facts how does uh how does our understanding our understanding get refined over time and how can how can scientists claim one thing and then maybe realized they made the mistake or going back to general relativity was was newton wrong in suggesting his theory of gravity was he wrong can we say he was wrong or did einstein only extend the scope of applicability in with his theory of gravity so i think adding to knowledge in science this important dimension of having knowledge about science and knowledge about scientific process and then there's a third aspect to it and i think this is knowledge to use science and knowledge to participate in our society and really being brave enough to not only stay in academia or stay in the classroom or wherever you are but actually trying to see how the different pieces fit together and just this idea that we have highly specialized disciplines their science and their humanities and arts they are not separate and i think and this is something that we um need to to convey and we need to show students at the society just because you have an interest in science doesn't mean that you cannot have an interest in the humanities or that you are not a creative and imaginative thinker so i think fostering critical thinking and promoting promoting scientific literacy starts with building awareness that we need knowledge in science knowledge about science and knowledge to use science and getting back to my personal um pathway i feel like i have moved through these different stages because as a student i immersed myself in physics and mathematics and i really learned the scientific knowledge and i loved it and i didn't need anything else it was just me and science right and you know you know that feeling and then when i started my my phd in physics education i was forced to learn about knowledge about science and gain knowledge about science what is the scientific method is there such a thing as the scientific methods and i feel like as a student as a physicist really i took so much for granted and i didn't reflect critically on that and these are assumptions just being able to to spell them out and being able to to to see that there are assumptions underlying physics and science more generally so this is something that i really learned in in my phd and now that i i finish my phd and i keep working on topics of science education and science communication i really feel i'm starting to use my knowledge um i yeah i'm starting to use my knowledge in and about science to to participate in society and to have impact and make a change and this was paul this was a really long answer too excellent answer i might add too very excellent answer so we have students watching possibly who are thinking about science further studies in science beyond the high school maybe even a science career what encouragement what advice might you want to give to them so i think the most important thing is that you should do what you're excited about and if you have this dispassion and this excitement for science go with it as long as you have fun and as long as you feel like learning science and learning more about science feels like playing then you're on the right path you have chosen the right path and of course i don't want to recruit every student into science like i'm not saying this is the only thing you can do but my advice would be science science is this huge playground there's so much to play with there's so much fun to have and there you you meet great people along the way you get to to travel you get to exchange ideas and being immersed in the scientific community is great it's not only the science but it's also about building connection um building a community or being part of a community so my advice obviously i'm biased but i think my advice is if you're excited about science go go for it and just explore read as much as you can i'm an avid reader and i think reading reading and just reading a little bit more than just the course material and falling down many rabbit holes like fall down as many rabbit holes as you can i remember the first time i took a course in general relativity gosh i think i spent my whole christmas break reading books about general relativity and um you're left a little bit confused maybe produced and confused but glad all the same because it's just yeah my i'm not sure like i'm i'm rambling but my advice is just um be excited be playful um read find people that just the fuel this excitement for further so that you surround yourself with people who have a similar passion so that you don't feel alone but that you can really see that you're part of your community which is so important these days like but i'm in lockdown right like what what keeps me going is that i know there are you in sydney and i have colleagues and like-minded friends all over the world so um find find the right people surround yourself with the right people the right colleagues and have fun with it your uh your answer is surprisingly similar to jeff wiener's answer and and it actually just is being a good scientist that builds our reliability in terms of uh in terms of our argument here really is about va totally finding your passion and going down that rabbit hole and keeping asking questions and keep exploring and that's just an intrinsic benefit you just enjoy the process of constantly yes it's hard sometimes yes it's challenging general relativity i still bends my mind pardon the pun but the the reality is that that's actually what fast is fascinating about it it's far more exciting than i mean newton's laws laws are important but there is something exciting about modern physics that drives you to want to know more to understand it better and so forth so i totally agree with you my last question is an opportunity an opportunity for you to teach something that you are currently really passionate about so think of a topic and it doesn't necessarily have to be physics education content but if someone said something in mixed company you go i want to share something with you what would that be okay um that would be a probably embodied cognition which is um only partly related to science but it's one of my current research interests and i i'm briefly um giving you an idea of what a body cognition is that showing you how i've used this in my research to understand how students make sense of abstract learning domains such as general relativity and i think before i start delving into embodied recognition um just to help listeners of years get an idea of what science education research entails it science education research is not only science we do research about scientific learning processes or how learners learn science but the methods we use are not necessarily scientific in the strict sense because people are messy right it's easy it's easy to study the world with the laws of physics and there are laws and there's mathematics but you're a teachable you know learning cannot be studied in this rigorous way people are messy and depending on the time of day or the temperature or like your general mood and if you've had your first coffee in the morning because for me it's it's morning right and i need my coffee to to keep going so um studying humans is generally messy and difficult and this is why we need different methods and these methods come from the social sciences they come from psychology they come from neuroscience and cognitive science and this brings me back to embodied cognition because in body care clinician is a family of theories and psychology and cognitive sciences and cognitive linguistics that basically tell you that we cannot understand learning and we cannot understand human cognition without taking the body into account and this is something most people think if they hear the word cognition learning they think it's happening in our brains right there's our mind and our body has nothing to do with it but interestingly just the fact that we have human bodies and that we perceive the world through our senses and that our cognitive and conceptual systems really build on this biological basis and this embodied basis influences the way we think and influences the way we make sense of the world so this is in a nutshell embodied cognition and ideas of imported cognition have had a long philosophical history i'm not going uh into that but uh what is exciting about it is that it allows me to unpack learning processes in learning domains that are highly abstract and this is general relativity for example because in general relativity we talk about four-dimensional curved space times can you visualize four dimensions paul it's super difficult right it's challenging nope and even three dimensions can be difficult trying to to make sense of three-dimensional geometry and um in my research i have found out or together with my colleagues you never do research alone we have found out that there is really a conceptual conflict between your embodied understanding of gravity and your embodied understanding of how you navigate our world this on one hand and then on the other hand einstein's abstract description or the abstract description of general relativity describing gravity not as a force in the classical sense but as the curvature of four-dimensional a time and making sense of this idea it's one thing to have abstract equations but how do you understand this and there's some there's a con yeah a conceptual conflict between our embodied understanding and our abstract understanding and this is something that i have explored in my research and i continue to explore how we can use perspective of embodied embodied cognition to help learners um make sense of science to help learners make sense of abstract ideas and you see this relates to science but it's not really part of science and if i was at a party i would probably not be the cool girl because i would talk about philosophy and cognitive science and a body technician but this is something that um i have a keen interest in these days is there a future paper in this i hope there are future proposals and grants and fellowships in it so yeah there are papers in the making um there are actually one paper um that i can share with you and maybe uh you want to put it on your um homepage as well is a paper that we published probably already three years ago in which we look at the famous rubber sheet uh analogy like you have this how can we how can we understand or visualize all the einstein's ideas well four-dimensional curved space-time is like a stretched rubber sheet and you put bowling balls and marbles onto it and i analyzed this this model or this analogy and i used our students in norway that we had worked with and i analyzed this and this analogy from an embodied cognition perspective to i give um yeah yeah to give just instructional ideas or ideas on how you can improve instructional strategies and general relativity so yeah there there has been some research going on and i hope there will be a lot more in the next months and yes excellent excellent well thank you so much meg lena for your time um i think uh we really got a sense of your passion for physics education i really appreciate you having a chat with me yeah thanks so much for inviting me i hope to have an opportunity to speak with you again thank you well i hope you enjoyed this episode please subscribe to get notifications of up and coming interviews as well as my other physics concepts my name is paul from physics high till next time

Channel: PhysicsHigh

Views: 4,416

Keywords: general relativity, theory of relativity, special relativity, albert einstein, teaching modern physics, magdalena kersting, teaching einstein, science podcast, physics podcast, einstein podcast

Id: cw-C4CtWaMQ

Length: 29min 4sec (1744 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021