Teaching about the environment, sustainability, and climate change
The editors of the American Journal of Physics and The Physics Teacher are joining together to issue a call for papers for special collections on the physics of the environment, sustainability, and climate change.
Our readers are well aware of the pressing global problems in these areas and the contributions that physicists have made in the past (including the 2021 Nobel Prize). Many physics teachers are looking for ways to better prepare our students to understand these problems as citizens and to address them as scientists. And we suspect that many of our readers have already found ways to teach these topics but have not thought to describe their work as a paper and share it with others. A special collection is our way of bringing together these individuals, motivating authors to share resources that will be collected in a convenient form for other readers.
Topics covered include, but are not limited to:
- Demonstrations
- Laboratory experiments
- Short units
- Homework problems
- Course outlines
- Curricular sequences
In choosing what to submit, focus on how your work can be useful to your colleagues, rather than merely on how successful was your implementation. It’s challenging to describe an entire semester-long course in a brief paper, so if you’ve developed a really novel and successful course, consider writing a textbook! However, if there’s a nugget that you think will be useful to readers, then please submit it. We also welcome (and in some cases, require) supporting material such as course handouts to be shared as supplementary material.
Guest Editors:
American Journal of Physics
The Physics Teacher
Submission and acceptance criteria:
The Physics Teacher focuses on physics instruction at the introductory level, both in secondary schools and in universities, and also on teaching physics concepts as part of general education courses; the benchmark length for a TPT article is 2000 words.
- TPT’s Editorial Policies can be found here
- To submit to TPT, visit the journal’s online submission system
- During the submission process you will be asked if your manuscript is part of a special topic. Please answer “yes” and select “Teaching about the environment, sustainability, and climate change” from the subsequent drop-down menu.
American Journal of Physics focuses on physics instruction beyond the introductory level, mostly at the undergraduate level but also including graduate level instruction when the topic is of high interest or broad usefulness.
- AJP’s Editorial Policies can be found here
- To submit to AJP, use the link from the journal’s submissions guidelines page.
- During the submission process you will be asked if your manuscript is part of a special topic. Please answer “yes” and select “Teaching about the environment, sustainability, and climate change” from the subsequent drop-down menu.
Both journals publish some papers on history and philosophy of physics and outreach to the general public, and authors of these papers are encouraged to contact the editors to determine which journal is more appropriate.