Teaching theory-building in physics

Physics students should practice theory-building if they are ever to participate in the scientific community, yet physics courses rarely teach it. In addition, practices of theory-building in the scientific community should be expanded to be worthy of people in marginalized groups, and students in these groups should be empowered to influence theory-building for the better. We describe a classroom-tested approach to support students' skills in proposing, negotiating, and refining elements of a physics theory. The approach begins with negotiating a "community agreement" to guide students' interactions, in which students and instructors decide how they will work together, creating an inclusive learning environment and demonstrating that consequential decisions are in the students' hands. Students are then given the opportunity and responsibility to co-create a "physics agreement," in which students revise, contest, or elaborate physics definitions and principles introduced by tutorial instruction. Negotiating a working agreement provides an avenue for criticism and offers a mechanism for community-level response to that criticism: in constructing the physics agreement, students exercise agency as physics knowers and share in classroom authority to define key concepts. Illustrations of the approach are drawn from our experience in an undergraduate course in special relativity, but the approach is not specific to this topic.