Pluralism-oriented pedagogy: An example from spacetime physics

Students rarely, if ever, encounter models of persistent and productive disagreements in physics, leaving them underprepared to contribute to the scientific community. Pluralism-oriented pedagogy (POP) is science teaching that acknowledges and supports diverse and incompatible concepts for the same phenomenon or data set. Historical theories are a rich source of material for POP in that they represent well-developed idea spaces that have resonated with many people in the past. POP has two key instructional goals when teaching students a past physical theory: (A) to make visible how past physicists negotiated and refined the standards to which that theory is held and (B) to develop students' capacities to creatively negotiate and refine such standards themselves. We offer an example of an intervention primarily aimed at the latter that scaffolds students' original reasoning with a key disagreement between two physicists in a historical case study. This intervention is from an undergraduate special relativity course appropriate for both physics and philosophy students.