Narrative in the Physics Classroom

David Booth's vision of enhanced literacy in Whatever Happened to Language Arts depends largely on guiding students to make connections between literary and historical narratives and their personal life stories. In some way, all the tales that “we” tell become a part of “us” both as a collective and as a collection of individuals. Students must be guided to “[find themselves] in story,” for“as personal storytellers … we learn from the stories of others and we take the truths out of these narratives .… our stories connect us to the others in our lives” (52). In order to reach students and create lasting, critical readers and thinkers, we must guide them to relate to, and to internalize, the narratives that we present to them.

Throughout my practicum placement in a university preparation grade 11 physics classroom and a university preparation grade 12 physics classroom, I attempted to explore the narratives that surround the discovery of certain fundamental principles of physics on both an individual level and on the level of the academic discipline itself.  The qualitative and subjective data that I collected through these explorations and student responses to them suggests that the use of narrative and framing techniques can connect abstract principles of the discipline to students' lived experiences, increasing students' immediate engagement in the classroom as well as their short and long term retention of information.

In one specific case, I introduced the concept of kinetic energy and couched its mathematical derivation in a narrative involving historical developments of cannons and the technological advances that improved their design. After having obtained the students' interest – based on a subjective assessment of their engagement in the class by monitoring levels of noise or “chatter,” inappropriate student-student interactions generally, and eye contact between myself and my students – I introduced an hypothetical narrative regarding cannon-based warfare. One side in the conflict had developed cannons that fired cannonballs of twice the mass, and the other side had developed cannonballs that could be fired with twice the velocity. As an impartial third party, we were tasked with determining who would win in such a conflict, all else being equal. Applying Kinematics, the work-energy theorem, and basic algebraic manipulations of established formulae, we then found that the latter group had the advantage.

In a second example, I then used the definition and formula related to kinetic energy in order to determine the energy that would be released by a collision between Earth and an actual Near Earth Object of a substantial mass, moving at a substantial speed. The value of energy released was so large that it had no significance in itself, so I related it to the Tsar bomb, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, by describing the energy released by its explosion – equivalent to the energy released by an explosion of a block of TNT approximately 320 m³, or as tall and as wide as the Eiffel Tower. The energy released by the collision between Earth and the Near Earth Object was almost five times that which was released by the Tsar Bomb's nuclear reaction. Several students approached me with questions regarding this example and tangentially related physics subjects. Not only had they absorbed the fundamental principles that I had sought to teach them, they had begun to make connections between the physics and their experience and background knowledge. As a

result, they appeared to enjoy the lesson and were eager participants in the ensuing problem-solving session and discussions.

The power of narrative that David Booth identifies can indeed be exploited in subjects other than English. Couching the principles of physics in narratives or real-life examples drawn from student experiences not only makes the material more relevant to them, it also generates engagement and in turn helps to curtail behavioral problems – an engaged student is less prone to act out. Given the ease with which Booth's theories related to narrative were applied in a physics classroom, I am eager for future opportunists to explore other strategies – that were originally intended for application in the limited context of an English course – in diverse and new settings.

Works Cited

Booth, David. Whatever Happened to Language Arts? Markham, Ontario: Pembroke Publishers Limited, 2009. Print.