Storia della fisica e Didattica della fisica come settori di ricerca integrati per il chiarimento concettuale e l'insegnamento della disciplina - History of physics and Physics education as integrated research areas for conceptual clarification and the teaching of the discipline

Drawing on my own experience in teaching History of physics courses for university students, I will start with some general and specific considerations on the role the History of physics can play to help a deeper understanding of disciplinary contents and improve their didactic transfer. Each of the three involved areas — Physics, History of physics, Physics education — constitutes a vast disciplinary domain with different approaches and specific methodologies. A major effort to define contents and goals is therefore required in advance to attempt a fruitful interplay among such specialized fields of knowledge. This work addresses this problem from a particular perspective, that is, by taking up some contents considered to be fundamental in the teaching of physics and showing how an in-depth study of their historical origin can contribute to conceptual clarification and teaching effectiveness. Two interdisciplinary workshops on topics of mechanics and optics are then considered as initiatives that have concretely tried to bring together history of physics and physics education scholars in view of a better integration of their respective skills to the benefit of the teaching of the discipline and the training of teachers.