Seeding Change: The Challenges of Transfer and Transformation of Educational Practice and Research in Physics (Part I)

Academia appears to do a remarkable job at producing the next generation of research faculty. The longanticipated shortage of well-qualified researchers has not appeared [1]. At the same time, while there are calls to reform educational practices in college and university classrooms, we are not widely preparing our future faculty to develop or implement these research-based educational practices. What mechanisms exist to foster the development of such practices and promote the field of PER more generally? These coupled papers examine the interrelated problems of supporting the development of the field, and the ‘transfer’ of what is known from PER to the more general populace of physics instructors. The first of these coupled papers outlines a framework of professionalism and faculty attitudes that is applied in the second paper in order to examine two programs designed to address the challenges of including education into the broader physics culture.