Reflections of Reflections – From Everyday Life Phenomena to Physical Awareness

Schlichting, H. Joachim. In: G. Planinsic and A. Mohoric (eds.): Informal Learning and Public Understanding of Physics. Ljubljana: University Press 2006, pp. 40 – 52

Physical education contributes in a special way to general education of young people. Therefore, physics lessons may not be restricted to pure physical topics but have to be combined with everyday life phenomena and problems. However, this is not as simple as it may appear at first sight, for the everyday life world does not contain the physical aspects for direct reading. As the pupils and  students are not trained to look at the world from a physical point of view, they will not see what they should see, although their retinas might be exposed by physically interesting phenomena. We will demonstrate and further explain this problem by discussing appropriate photographs and paintings. Some preliminary investigations show that teaching and learning physics within the  context of everyday life phenomena may be very stimulating and successful.

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