THE DISCIPLINE-CULTURE MODEL AND CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS IN SCIENCE EDUCATION:THE CASE OF QUANTUM FIELD THEORY

The contribution concerns the results of a study exploiting the educational and cultural potential of a topic from contemporary physics developed within the PhD thesis of the first author. The study concerns the application of the Discipline-Culture Model (DCM), suggested by Tseitlin and Galili (2005) for demonstrating the cultural relevance of the equation considered emblematic in contemporary physics: the Klein Gordon Equation (KGE). The study is framed within the general problem of reconstructing, from an educational point of view, of the main conceptual steps that took place in modelling object and interaction from classical to contemporary physics. The study, carried out in a collaboration between the physics education researchers of Bologna and Jerusalem, has been developed in three steps: i) analysis of university textbooks; ii) analysis of data collected by means of interviews and questionnaire to experts; iii) re-analysis of KGE in the light of the DCM. The main results concern: (a) the revealed problematic educational issues related to the lack of a cultural perspective in teaching KGE and, in general, in Quantum Field Theory (QFT) teaching; and (b) the effectiveness of the DCM as a perspective for reanalysing the content knowledge about KGE and exploiting its cultural and educational value