Physics students who teach cultivate a deeper sense of professional identity

Historically, graduate education’s goal was to prepare future academics, and has thus focused on the creation and conservation of disciplinary knowledge. However, today’s reality is that most STEM graduate students (GSs) go on to non-academic careers. As educators, it should be our aim to equip GSs for success, regardless of career aspirations. It is therefore essential that we shift our focus towards preparing a new type of scholar – one with a strong professional identity – rather than preparing a person for a specific type of career. We argue that helping students cultivate a professional identity has been largely missing from physics graduate education.

Connecting ideas across disciplines and applying abstract knowledge to real problems—as one does when teaching—is a necessity for the development of a strong professional identity. It is hence the integration of knowledge transformation (teaching) into graduate physics education that led us to create the Graduate Identity Formation through Teaching (GIFT) project. In GIFT, GSs are supported to construct adult-level, inquiry-based, 30-minute lessons based on specific K–6 Next Generation Science Standards. The GSs serve as disciplinary experts by teaching their lesson to elementary teacher candidates (TCs). The TCs then turn this knowledge into 15-minute mini-lessons for elementary students. Finally, the GSs observe the TCs teaching the lesson to K–6 students and reflect on the entire experience. We will present results from four semesters of GIFT showing that project participation promotes the development of GS professional identity, with implications for how we can support physics GSs in terms of their current educational activities and their future careers.