Physics and History Subject Viewed through Disciplinary Literacy

Abstract

In this article, we would like to introduce a collaborative study that was a little special among the various collaborative studies we did. It is a collaboration with history education and Korean language education majors in the viewpoint of physics education major. The comparison of the two disciplines, ‘physics’ and ‘history’, which seem a little far from natural science and do not seem to have anything in common, becomes a suitable judgment for Korean language education majors as ‘disciplinary literacy’. It is possible because we bring disciplinary literacy that contrasts with content area literary, and it is the viewpoint that reading and writing education should be approached from the standpoint of each subject because the epistemology of subject interaction, vocabulary and major knowledge, and discourse interests are different among subjects. Although physics and history represent the humanities and natural sciences, respectively. They have many similarities and differences. The main body of this article is structured around content that is easy to access even if you are not an education-related expert, excluding the excessively academic part of the three studies that compared physics and history. The first is a comparison of reading physics and historical texts. It is natural that everyone reads the writings of their major the best, but this study started with the question of whether the characteristics of that major will appear when reading the writings of other majors. Second, the descriptors of the achievement standards of the physics and history curriculum are analyzed. In Korea, the national curriculum is revised about every 7 years, and this study is conducted to find an answer to the question of whether disciplinary characteristics will appear in this curriculum document. Lastly, it is judged that these disciplinary characteristics would be well revealed in textbooks. By comparing the description methods of physics and history textbooks, we discuss on the characteristics of the studies.