Time and space: undergraduate Mexican physics in motion

Time and space: undergraduate Mexican physicsin motion

Antonia Candela

Received: 23 February 2010 / Accepted: 23 February 2010 / Published online: 12 March 2010! Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract This is an ethnographic study of the trajectories and itineraries of undergrad-uate physics students at a Mexican university. In this work learning is understood as beingable to move oneself and, other things (cultural tools), through the space–time networks ofa discipline (Nespor in Knowledge in motion: space, time and curriculum in undergraduatephysics and management. Routledge Farmer, London, 1994). The potential of this socio-cultural perspective allows an analysis of how students are connected through extendedspaces and times with an international core discipline as well as with cultural featuresrelated to local networks of power and construction. Through an example, I show that,from an actor-network-theory (Latour in Science in action. Harvard University Press,Cambridge, 1987), that in order to understand the complexities of undergraduate physicsprocesses of learning you have to break classroom walls and take into account students’movements through complex spatial and temporal traces of the discipline of physics.Mexican professors do not give classes following one textbook but in a moment-to-moment open dynamism tending to include undergraduate students as actors in classroomevents extending the teaching space–time of the classroom to the disciplinary researchwork of physics. I also find that Mexican undergraduate students show initiative anddisplay some autonomy and power in the construction of their itineraries as they areencouraged to examine a variety of sources including contemporary research articles,unsolved physics problems, and even to participate in several physicists’ spaces, as forexample being speakers at the national congresses of physics. Their itineraries also open upnew spaces of cultural and social practices, creating more extensive networks beyond thoseassociated with a discipline. Some economic, historical and cultural contextual features ofthis school of sciences are analyzed in order to help understanding the particular waystudents are encouraged to develop their autonomy.

Keywords Ethnography ! Undergraduate physics ! Students’ trajectories !Students’ itineraries ! Actor-network ! Disciplinary space–time

A. Candela (&)Department of Educational Research, Centro de Investigacion y Estudios Avanzados,Cda. Tenorios 235, Col Granjas Coapa, CP 14330 Mexico D.F., Mexicoe-mail: [email protected]

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Cult Stud of Sci Educ (2010) 5:701–727DOI 10.1007/s11422-010-9259-5

Resumen ejecutivo Este es un estudio etnografico sobre la construccion institucionalde las trayectorias de los alumnos de la licenciatura de fısica, y los itinerarios producidospor su movimiento a traves de las redes disciplinarias, en una universidad mexicana. Desdeuna perspectiva socio-cultural se analizan transcripciones de clases de termodinamica deltercer semestre de la carrera, entrevistas a alumnos y docentes, ası como observacionesetnograficas de las practicas de resolucion de problemas y de diversas actividades cultu-rales llevadas a cabo por los alumnos. Se entiende el aprendizaje como la capacidad demoverse uno mismo, y de mover otras cosas como son los artefactos representacionales(instrumentos de laboratorio, libros de texto, notas de clase, problemas fısicos, teorıas,graficas, ecuaciones matematicas) a traves de las redes espacio-temporales de la disciplina(Nespor in Knowledge in motion: space, time and curriculum in undergraduate physics andmanagement. Routledge Farmer, London, 1994). Muestro que, desde la teorıa del actor-red(Latour in Science in action. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1987), y para comp-render las complejidades del proceso de aprendizaje de los alumnos, es necesario romperlas paredes del aula y analizar como se extiende el espacio-temporal para incluir tanto laspracticas cotidianas como las disciplinarias. La potencialidad de la aproximacion teorica semuestra a traves de un ejemplo que describe como extiende un profesor los espacios y lostiempos locales para construir trayectorias que conectan a los alumnos con la estructurainternacional de la disciplina y con las redes locales de poder del campo. Esta orientaciontambien permite comprender como contribuye el docente a aportar poder y autonomıa paraque los alumnos construyan los itinerarios que los acerquen a las practicas reales de lafısica. El profesor imparte sus clases, teniendo como referencia varios libros de texto yartıculos recientes, en una dinamica colaborativa que incluye a los alumnos como actoresen la construccion del conocimiento. Utiliza una amplia artillerıa de evaluaciones cualit-ativas y cuantitativas como un instrumento que le permite conocer el razonamiento de losestudiantes sobre el tema de estudio y adecuar las lecciones a sus necesidades de com-prension. Informa sobre problemas no resueltos en el campo y acerca a los alumnos aespacios tecnologicos que pueden desarrollar en su futuro profesional. Sin un texto ex-clusivo de referencia para estudiar y resolver tareas, los estudiantes tienen que desarrollarcriterio y autonomıa para buscar fuentes de informacion adecuadas desplazandose por lasredes disciplinarias y produciendo itinerarios innovadores. Los alumnos tambien desplie-gan cierto poder para participar en espacios de los fısicos como es la presentacion detrabajos en congresos de la disciplina. Sus itinerarios tambien abren nuevos espacios depracticas sociales y culturales creando redes sociales mas extensas que las propias de ladisciplina. Finalmente analizo algunos componentes del contexto economico del paıs, y delhistorico y cultural de esta facultad de ciencias, que pueden contribuir a explicar la au-tonomıa y poder que se les otorga a los estudiantes de fısica en esta universidad.

This is an ethnographic study of the career trajectories of undergraduate student physicsmajors at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). The purpose of thisstudy is to show how their trajectories are connected through extended space and time withthe international core discipline, as well as to local networks of power and construction ofthe disciplinary work of physicists.

In order to develop this analysis it is important to make explicit my conception ofscientific knowledge as well as how to understand students’ appropriation of it. From asociocultural perspective scientific knowledge can be defined as a social construction donethrough discourse processes within a cultural community (Lemke 1990), as it is thecommunity of physicists. Science as any other conceptualization of reality requires

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communication of shared suppositions and meanings among a community in order to besocially intelligible. I understand discourse as social action situated in an interactivecontext (Edwards 1995).

However, I assume social constructions do not only depend on face-to-face commu-nication in the moment of the interaction. Taking into account the distributed character ofknowledge (Duranti 1997) people are also interacting with those that were present in othertimes and spaces (Nespor 1994), those that participants have interiorized in their con-ceptual history. People (physics students in this case) also interact with social knowledgedistributed in representational artifacts (as textbooks, blackboards, notebooks, laboratoryinstruments) and technological representations (as theories, graphics, equations, mathe-matics). Artifacts and representations can be understood as cultural tools as they arehistorical condensations of social and cultural knowledge.

Social constructions of physics are characteristic of the physicists’ community practices.The professors and students are members of complex communities extended in time andspace conforming complex networks of social relations (Latour 1987). Voices of others arepresent at every local interaction through participants’ sociocultural history, as well asthrough the spaces, physical objects, cultural tools and technological representations.

As Roth and Tobin (2009) state, qualitative methods of science education research maynow constitute a dominant means of analyzing classroom practices. In particular theinclusion of discourse analysis into the qualitative framework of the student–teacherinteraction makes explicit the collective processes of scientific knowledge construction.Recent research, which is of a sociocultural perspective, argues that interpreting discourseand action in classroom practice requires paying attention to what students have learnedoutside the classroom, inside and outside school, and how that learning supports whathappens inside a certain classroom (Lemke 2002a). In this article, I look for a way to breakdown classroom walls in order to follow the paths of students as they construct knowledgein physics.

Some anthropological studies approach tearing down classroom walls by studyingpractices that come into play outside of school—in the family, the community, the churchand other everyday places—in order to identify students’ cultural conceptions. Thesestudies argue that students bring their knowledge to school and use it to interpret andconstruct academic knowledge (Rockwell 2007). Thus, classroom interaction is analyzedin relation to possible contextual referents available to students in their everyday lives.Conversation analysis (CA) questions these approaches with the argument that takingexternal information to that which arises out of discursive interaction within the classroomis ambiguous because there is an infinite amount of data that can be relevant in interpretingeducational practices, and the criterion of the researcher to choose it may not representwhat is important to the participants. For CA, everything relevant for the participants mustbe witnessed in the sequential and detailed analysis of several turns of the student–teacherdiscursive interaction (Edwards and Potter 1992). However, Lemke (2002b) states that theproblem is finding useful ways to connect classroom micro-descriptions to macro-analysisthat follows the students along their different paths to knowledge construction.

Another way to break down classroom walls by acknowledging external informationstudents bring from the outside is to take into account Giddens’ ideas: ‘‘Social activityoccurs in time and space, but neither time nor space have been incorporated into the centerof social theory; they are ordinarily treated more as environments in which social conductis enacted…rather than [as] integral to its occurrence’’ (1979, p. 202).

I address a sociocultural perspective taking into account Giddens’ proposals and the-oretical contributions of social studies of science (e.g., Latour and Woolgar 1986) to make

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an ethnographic study of the undergraduate students’ trajectories and itineraries of physicsin Mexico.

From this approach, schools are local spaces where practices are constituted by othereveryday practices such as academics, economics, political, and cultural from extendedtimes and spaces. These practices are defined by diverse space–time scales (Nespor 2004)and also have multiple articulations. Nespor (1994) speaks to this by reminding us that,‘‘practice itself is not reducible to the observable activities of individuals in local settings.Practice is distributed across spaces and times producing social interactions, settings andevents, as intersections of trajectories that tie together distant spaces and times and givethem form as social space’’ (1994, p. 16). All these articulated processes constitute whatLatour (1987) defines as a network, in which resources are accumulated in points thatchange and move and are also connected to other elements, transforming isolated resourcesinto a network.

As a consequence, in this paper, instead of taking learning and knowledge in a physicscommunity as something located in an individual’s mind or as a local discursive socialconstruction, I use Nespor’s (1994, p. 131) conceptualization in which ‘‘learning is first,being able to move oneself and, second other things (as cultural tools), through the space–time networks of the discipline.’’

In order to teach students to move through the space and time of a discipline, educa-tional institutions construct trajectories in the form of material environments such asbuildings, classrooms, laboratories, and libraries. Institutional trajectories also includedistributed events through representational artifacts such as textbooks, articles, laboratoryequipment, class notes, homework, equations, records, grade distributions, defined byacademic programs, curricula, schedules institutional regulations and normative mecha-nisms. Trajectories are defined as:

… life episodes with a capacity for self-regeneration and self-perpetuation. Suchepisodes are widely programmed into our social institutions: in graduate and pro-fessional schools, in internal labor markets, and still, to a surprising extent, ininstitutions like marriage (Abbot 2001, p. 248).

Trajectories are also defined as: spatially and temporally distributed events institu-tionally organized as obligatory passage points on the route to stabilized identity categories(Nespor 1994), in this case, through the physics program. In order to understand students’processes of learning, one must take into account that new times and spaces are producedwith their movements, in what Nespor (1994) defines as their itineraries: spatial andtemporally complex traces created by students’ actual educational movements alongmultiple institutionally-defined trajectories.

My analysis is inclusive of how Mexican students are taught to move along the disci-plinary trajectories connecting distant spaces and times, as well as students’ specific waysof dealing with institutional conditions and articulating academic and everyday worlds inparticular ways that define their own itineraries.

In his study of undergraduate students of physics in the US, Nespor (1994) assumed thatteachers and students are always working to relate classroom activities to their largerongoing experiences inside and outside of schools (everyday knowledge, academicknowledge, cultural activities, social relations) in order to make sense of them. Thisimplies that time and space are important concepts and as such organizational categoriesfor analysis so that the researcher can take into account other settings and other moments ofknowledge construction. ‘‘What is left out of both accounts [the self contained classroomstaken out of history and geography, and the classroom as an interactional vortex as it is

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from the CA perspective] are the standpoints of travelers (students) moving through thesespaces over time’’ (Nespor 2006a, p. 1).

Taking movement as a standpoint, Nespor (2006b) develops what he calls a relationalperspective on classrooms by looking at them as they are constituted through networks ofrelationships connecting animate and inanimate objects, out of which extended times andspaces are produced. Massey states: ‘‘Instead… of thinking of places as areas withboundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of socialrelations and understandings,’’ moments in which our ‘‘experiences and understanding areactually constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment asthe place itself’’ (1993, pp. 65–66). Nespor sees schooling in terms of time and space, as anetwork coming from multiple flows of material devices and representations through whichstudents have to move in order to be able to manage other representations of spaces andtimes which are characteristic of disciplinary networks.

From this perspective, the problem is to understand how events inside and outside theclassroom are articulated through structures (curricular organization, institutional norms),mechanisms and representational artifacts that enroll pupils in certain trajectories acrosstime and space. I am interested in showing that classroom walls must be analyticallybroken in order to understand students’ learning.

For this work I will analyze the discursive interactions and representational productionamong students and a professor of physics. Additionally, I will take into account students’interviews and ethnographic descriptions of material spaces such as study groups in orderto contextualize students’ movements within disciplinary networks and out of schoolactivities as they construct their own itineraries. Some elements of non-verbal discourseand multimodality (Kress et al. 2005), such as paralinguistic modes, gestures, and actions,are also taken into account in order to show characteristic features of classroom interactionbetween teachers and students.

The empirical data come from video-recordings, which are part of a more extendedstudy conducted in the Physics department of the School of Sciences at the NationalAutonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). In Mexican universities all undergraduatestudents of physics follow the same program no matter if they want to continue graduatestudies or if they want to teach physics. The physics classes of seven groups at differentyears of their career and with different professors were recorded. Other sources of datainclude interviews with professors, questionnaires answered by students in their lastsemester of a four-year program of physics majors, ethnographic notes on study groups ofstudents working to solve homework problems, students’ notes, homework, records andgrades, and ethnographic observations regarding the use of spaces at the university. For thisarticle, I will focus on one professor’s video-recordings of his third-semester classes. I alsotake data from the study groups, interviews, homework and grades of some of his third-semester students.

The context of undergraduate physics at a Mexican University

The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), which has foundational ante-cedents from more than 450 years ago in Mexico City, is one of the most importantuniversities in Spanish America. It has been ranked, in terms of quality, 44th on a list of16,000 universities worldwide and has received in 2009, the ‘‘Prıncipe de Asturias’’ prizefrom the king of Spain, as recognition of its academic level and high productivity. It is apublic university where students do not pay tuition. This university which is well known in


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Mexico as democratic, has been critical of the government several times in its history, withrepressive consequences on some occasions. After the 1968 students’ movement, theuniversity initiated a massive inscription that resulted in more than 300,000 studentsstudying traditional and new careers. This massive inscription is also the basis for the largenumber of students from low income families studying at UNAM today. For example, in1985, 78% of the students of the UNAM came from families that live with less than 10dollars a day (Martınez della Roca and Ordorika 1993) and this percentage has veryprobably increased.

The School of Science was established in 1910, when degrees in Mathematics, Physics,Chemistry, Biology, Geology and Geophysics were established at the National School ofHigher Studies in Mexico City. On UNAM’s present central campus, constructed in 1954at the Ciudad Universitaria in Mexico City, the School of Science was located at the center,with the President’s building in front, humanities and social science colleges on one side,technology departments on the other and the medical college in the back. The building’scenter position was meant to represent science’s place at the center of knowledge. In 1977,the college changed its location in order to increase the space dedicated to teaching and toits associated research institutes (Physics, Astronomy, Mathematics and Biology) to aperipheral position of the University. In this actual place there are five areas of study in thecollege: Physics, Biology, Mathematics, Computational Sciences and Actuarial sciences.In attendance are approximately 5,000 students, 400 full-time professors and 1,500 part-time professors. Approximately one-fifth (1,100) of those are physics students, and 66 full-time professors offer physics and mathematics courses in the four-year program. Mostphysics professors have done their undergraduate studies at UNAM. Even though UNAMhas some campuses in other parts of the country, it has only one physics program, which islocated at the Ciudad Universitaria campus.

This School has displayed political inclinations for many years. Students and someprofessors have played an important role in most of the social movements that haveinvolved the university and the country. For example, the students’ movement of 1968 andmore recently, the Zapatista movement both had a significant political impact on nationallife, the first one in opening new spaces for democracy and the second one in the recog-nition of indigenous cultures as important components of the political and cultural life ofthe country.

The School also encourages cultural activities, which are all free. For example, in theStudents’ Manual (‘‘La Facultad de Ciencias y tu’’ 2006), a series of competitive activitiessuch as sports, chess, dominoes, tops, marbles, kites and other games with Mexican toyslike ‘‘baleros’’ are offered as optional activities. The School also offers courses in guitar,flute, chorus, photography and theater in addition to the academic programs. Students haveindependently constructed a space around the buildings where they can practice circusactivities and ‘‘haki.’’ There are frequent concerts, cinema sessions, conferences on diversetopics and political assemblies held at the school auditorium. One of the professorsinterviewed stated that he invites students to participate in diverse cultural activitiesbecause he finds that they become better physics students when they are interested in andparticipate in these.

A positivist approach to science and to physics was challenged as a result of offeringphilosophy of science and history of science courses as part of the curriculum in the late60 s because of the initiative of students. It is also interesting to note that even though thereis an institutionally recommended sequence to the curriculum of this program, it is notcompulsory thus offering degrees of flexibility for students.

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The class

In order to study students’ movements through the disciplinary network of physics, I willanalyze a part of a course entitled Collective Phenomena. This course is offered in the thirdsemester, where 21 male, and 7 female students, are introduced to thermodynamics, wavesand fluids. In particular, I focus on classes that introduced thermodynamics. I felt that theseclasses help me identify a particular case that can show how students were introduced to anew representational technology as part of their trajectory where they have to articulate iteveryday and other representational productions of space–time of other courses of physics.I examine one full time professor of the 12 full time professors who offered this course inthe second semester of 2007 with different schedules offered, from early in the morning tolate afternoon, so that students could choose depending on their other academic or socialactivities or even their job schedules. By the way, it is interesting to realize that 57% of thestudents declared in the questionnaires that they have jobs while they study; only 53% ofthese jobs relate to physics. This is a professor who accepted the observation of his classes,something that is not easy at the university level.

Students describe this professor as ‘‘good,’’ arguing that ‘‘he explains very well’’ (‘‘elexplica muy bien’’), ‘‘he takes an interest in students, asks them to question and to analyzethe phenomena and not just the mathematics’’ (‘‘se interesa en los alumnos, en quepregunten y analicen los fenomenos y no solo la matematica’’), even though they find itvery difficult to pass his course. After obtaining a Ph.D. at Temple University in Phila-delphia, in Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics, this professor worked for 20 yearsin public technological institutions in Mexico, including the Mexico City Subway systemand the Electrical Research Institute of the National Commission on Electric Energy. Hecame back to teach at the university some years ago.

His course is unusually well attended, given the 40%-50% withdrawal rate in mostphysics courses, as the professors and students told me in the interviews. When they cannotmanage the amount of work that they have taken on for a semester, students frequentlydrop out of courses and plan to take them later. It is also characteristic of this course thatmost of the students pass it with good grades (8.24 out of 10 is the average grade for thegroup, as can be seen in the list of grades the professor allowed me to see at the end on theyear). During the semester I observed classes, only two students failed, and eight of themdid not take the final exam.

Another interesting feature of this course is its intensive collaborative interaction usingboth verbal and non-verbal modes. Images of the class are visual representations of thecollaborative interactions between the professor and the students. In one of the sessions Ianalyzed, the professor presents some equations on the blackboard. In order to solve theproblem he gives as a guide to the class the following: ‘‘What I will show you is why youneed to learn thermo.’’(Transcription 11/10/2007). However, he uses most of the 2 h of thissession talking in front of the group, explaining (Fig. 1), asking students about theirpersonal experience with some phenomena related to what is being taught (Fig. 2).

He also expends time listening to their questions (Fig. 3), thinking about them (Fig. 4)and answering, all without writing anything on the blackboard.

The professor says that the reason he takes so much time in discursive interaction withstudents, is because it is important for him that students can develop an ‘‘intuition’’ of thephysics’ problems before they are introduced as a mathematical representation. What hemeans by ‘‘physics’ intuition,’’ is the change from a representational production, as it is amathematical formulation, back to an everyday phenomenon familiar to the students.


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The professor’s gestures are very expressive in the way he tries to approach students. Heis so animated that he even almost falls off the teaching platform in the front of theclassroom. Analyzed as a semiotic mode (Kress et al. 2005), body gestures are ‘‘talkingabout’’ or constructing the interest of the teacher in the students. It can be said that there isa teaching approach contained in the body gestures—in this case, it is co-constructivist.Specifically, he is trying to construct knowledge by following students’ gestures andcomments and not just giving the information or explaining.

Knowledge appears to be the product of a collective experience of collaboration basedon these images. Most of the students participate by asking, answering, explaining andarguing among themselves and with the professor their interests, not only with words butalso through their gestures to describe a material artifact while at the same time they ask a

Fig. 1 The professor explaining with discursive and gestural modes

Fig. 2 Asking the students’ personal experiences

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question or make a suggestion (Fig. 5), all of which indicate that they are thinking (Fig. 6)about the topic being discussed.

As the teacher explained (Interview 28/02/2008), the questions, the answers and eventhe facial expressions of students are very important for him because through them he candetermine whether they have understood as well as what orientation he has to give toupcoming classroom activities. He frequently asks them questions about their ideas on thephysics content (as: ‘‘are there really incomprehensive fluids?’’ ‘‘>realmente hay fluidosincompresibles?’’ or ‘‘what in hell is the temperature?’’ ‘‘>que demonios es la tempera-tura?’’) and artifacts of everyday life (‘‘what is a thermopar?’’ ‘‘>que es un termopar?’’), aswell as about their understanding of the representational artifacts he introduces and specificapplications to the class topic. He continuously encourages them to make comments and toquestion him when they have doubts.

Fig. 3 Attentive listening to students’ questions

Fig. 4 Thinking about students’ comments


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This collaborative work is different from the physics classes described by Nespor(1994), which focus on formal lectures explaining textbook lessons with very few inter-ruptions by the students. This also holds true even in those cases where professors relatephysics content to everyday knowledge in order to help students understand it.

Production of representational space–time in the classroom

The relation with people and things that are not present in the interaction is constructedthrough different representational and communicative resources (Duranti 1997). ‘‘Whenwe act we’re simultaneously interacting with the people and things in the immediateenvironment and with people and things spatially and temporally removed from us, butnone the less present in the situation in some way’’ (Nespor 1994, p. 3). Representations

Fig. 5 Making suggestions about the material disposition of the artifact

Fig. 6 Asking and thinking about the problem

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like textbooks, problems, equations, records and graphics therefore shape practice bymobilizing distant disciplinary spaces as the real world of physics. In this way, repre-sentations function as signs and significations of distant material spaces and times (Harvey1989, p. 218). Taking these considerations into account, I will analyze how representationsof distant spaces and times are constructed in a thermodynamics class.

The professor initiates this class session by asking the students about what they did inthe last class. After a dialogue, he summarizes the problem they have solved.Excerpt 1:

T. remember you have a canal …with a free surface of fluid andthen what you did was introduce here a damn wall and …push it and then pull it back to its original position,for sure you have already done this at the laboratory,and you generated a disturbance that deformedthe damn surface, yes or no?and the question you asked yourselves washow can we describe the evolution in time and spaceof this damn deformation… yes or no?… and after some suppositions …we get an equation

Extracto 1:

Mo. Acuerdense, tienen un canal y.una superficie libre del fluidoy entonces lo que hicieron fue meter una canija pared acay… empujarla y jalarla pa atras a la posicionen la que estaba originalmenteseguro que ese ya lo hicieron en el laboratorio >si?y…generaron una perturbacion que deformola canija superficie >si o no?y la pregunta que se hicieron es…como describir la evolucion en el tiempo y en elespacio de esa canija deformacion >sopas o no?… y despues de algunas suposiciones…obtuvimos una ecuacion

It is interesting to note how he discursively emphasizes students as agents (‘‘you did,‘‘you generated,’’ ‘‘you asked’’) of the actions directed toward the represented material(‘‘introduce here a damn wall,’’ ‘‘push’’ and ‘‘pull’’) and of the description of the evolutionin time and space of the changes in an artifact (a deformation produced in a canal withfluid), with a technological representation (equation) in a disciplinary mode (mathematicalform). With his discourse, as well as with his body language, he is constructing a col-laborative orientation that can make the students part of the process of producing class-room knowledge. His expressions and the way he chooses to speak (‘‘damn wall,’’ ‘‘damnsurface,’’ ‘‘damn deformation’’) show his closeness with the students, as he uses day-to-dayexpressions not common in a formal speech as damn. He is also drawing ties acrosseveryday and disciplinary terms. This excerpt also shows that time and space are some ofthe important concepts used and constructed in physics in order to describe changes in thematerial environment. The wave equation is the unchanging representation that describesthe changes in time and space that the surface of the fluid, under the present conditions canhave. It doesn’t talk about the participants’ social activities or the technological repre-sentations moving through the space–time but about the changes in time and space of aphenomenon.


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However, the space–time dimensions are not only presented in a representational form,such as with a wave equation. The professor’s discourse also constructs an extension of spaceand time by relating this sessionwith thework done in the previous class and at the laboratory.Thus, in the following sequence, we can see the construction of continuity with the activity ofthe previous class and the laboratory practices. The professor connects different times andspaces,making the studentsmove the representations they have arrived at in previous settings.

This excerpt is an example of how the professor mobilizes representations of otherspaces and times, and brings them into the classroom in order to co-construct disciplinaryrepresentations of heat and temperature.Excerpt 2:

T. when was the first time you have heard about temperature?B. when we had feverT. and what do you mean with ‘‘having fever’’?G. that you are a little hotT. that you are hot?Sts. ha:::: ha:::::T. but let’s pay attention: if you notice, something interesting

here is that there is confusionbetween the high temperature and what is hot,what do you mean when you say that something is hot?what does it mean that it has heat?

St. that it has a lot of energyT. ok:: you have said it (.) but how do you relate heat with energy?B. I don’t knowT. ok (.) look it is interesting because from a historical point of view

there was a terrible confusion… some time ago it was thought thatheat was a kind of [fluid…

B. [caloricT. caloric, but it was a very funny fluid because it had no mass,

however, this is not the funny thing, it is that it onlymanifest itself when there was a difference in temperature (.)so it looks like there is something circular thereas there is a difference of temperaturebecause somebody is warm, ok (.)but it only appears when it is a difference of temperature

St. Ha. ha

Extracto 2:

Mo. >cuando escucharon por primera vez sobre la temperatura?Ao. cuando nos dio fiebreMo. y >que querıan decir con que les dio fiebre?Aa. cuando estas calientitoMo. >que estaban calientes?As. ja:::: ja:::::Mo. pero fıjense si se dan cuenta hay una cosa que es interesante que

hay una confusion entre una alta temperatura y lo que esta calientey cuando se refieren a que esta caliente >que cosa es lo que quieredecir? >que quiere decir que tiene calor?

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Ao. que tiene mucha energıaMo. aja::.tu lo dijiste (.) pero >como asociaste el calor con la energıa?Ao. no seMo. bueno fıjense es curioso pero desde el punto de vista historico hubo

una confusion terrible… en una epoca se penso que el calorera algun tipo de [fluido

Ao. [caloricoMo. calorico pero era un fluido muy chistoso… porque era un fluido

que no tenıa masa si pero eso no era lo chistososino que solamente se manifestaba cuando habıa diferenciade temperatura entonces como que ahı hay algo circular, o seahay diferencia de temperatura porque alguien esta caliente >verdad?pero solamente se manifiesta cuando hay diferencia de temperaturas

As. ja::: ja::::

In this excerpt, the professor talks about temperature with a question about the everydayexperiences of students, beginning with the first time they heard the term. With a sense ofhumor (‘‘that you are hot?’’) he shows closeness with his students—that he can take astudent’s expression as a joke. He also takes their experiences from other times and spacesand asks questions in order to construct some clarifying points (the difference between heatand temperature, the relationship between heat and energy) to orient their construction of aphysicist’s concept of temperature. This excerpt shows how the everyday world is mobi-lized and then reconstructed in a different form characteristic of scientific understanding.The students show the confidence they have in the professor, giving their opinions andeven expressing quite clearly when they don’t know something.

The professor’s discourse not only extends time and space towards the everydayexperience of students but also draws attention to the historical development of scientificconcepts. He introduces a historical trace of a linguistic and symbolic artifact such ascaloric and its ‘‘funny’’ features. With this word ‘‘funny,’’ he is expressing a kind ofcontrast with what is actually accepted as conceptually correct in physics. This interpre-tation is sustained by the students’ laughter, showing the distance that they too find fromthe concept of caloric and their own conceptualizations, even from everyday ideas. Byoverlapping, one of the students shows that he already knows about the caloric theory. Theprofessor is also implicitly manifesting the representational changes of physics’ explana-tions of a natural phenomenon (heat) through time. In this way he is challenging a posi-tivistic (realistic) perspective of science. Later, the professor tells the students to look upthe etymological roots of the words ‘‘energy’’ and ‘‘entropy’’ as homework. This is anotherway of relating the concepts of physics with the production of knowledge in anothercontext.

In these two excerpts, we can see the professor, along with the students, directing theco-construction of disciplinary representations where extended space and time are pro-duced. He begins and finishes every topic with examples from students’ everyday expe-riences in order to interest them in the academic representations of these phenomena.Moving from everyday life ideas to information from previous classes and other coursesand taking into account historical conceptions, the professor is changing representations toengage students in the disciplinary networks affiliated with the conceptual constructions ofphysics. He is also encouraging agency in his students, taking them from their spaces ofeveryday representations into the systems of signs and tools affiliated with the culture andhistory of physics.


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It is also interesting to analyze this professor’s actions in order to conceive of thestudents as an actor-network. For Callon (1987, p. 93), ‘‘An actor-network is simulta-neously an actor whose activity is networking heterogeneous elements and a network thatis able to redefine and transform what it is made of.’’ Nespor (1994, p. 9) calls actor-networks ‘‘fluid and contested definitions of identities and alliances that are simultaneouslyframeworks of power.’’ Thus it can be said that the actor-network conceptualizationemphasizes the dialectical relationship between the actors’ identities as defined by thenetworks in which they move and the redefinition of the networks by the spatial andtemporal events that students’ movements produce.

Callon (1986) distinguishes four moments in the process of constructing the actor-network: problematization (the way network-builders define allowable identities), ‘‘inter-essement,’’ enrollment (the multiple negotiations, tricks and trials of strength that go withthe ‘‘interessements’’ and enable learners to succeed within the discipline) and mobiliza-tion (the method of stabilizing enrollment).

The professor told me that, ‘‘the essential part of the course is the development ofphysics’ intuition and understanding of what we are doing’’ (La parte esencial del curso esel desarrollo de la intuicion fısica y que comprendan lo que estamos haciendo) (Interview28/02/2008). With this purpose in mind, he ‘‘follows the logical sequence, trying to arriveat some applications with which the students are familiar’’ (sigue la secuencia logicatratando de aterrizar en aplicaciones con las que los alumnus esten familiarizados). Duringthe class session he gives them suggestions about doing some experiments at home bysuggesting they introduce a thermometer into boiling water and observe what happens withthe column of mercury in order to talk about what it means when it ‘‘expands,’’ or playingwith a thermopar to see what are they measuring. He tries to avoid the type of lecturingwhere the professors just follow the book; he says, ‘‘when you finish the text you just don’tknow what to do with that’’ (cuando terminas el texto simplemente no sabes que hacer coneso). He does not follow any particular textbook. He looks at the program and then reviewssome texts and articles in order to organize the topics and problems for the course in hisown way, trying to inspire the ‘‘interessement’’ of students through some applications andusing the students’ understandings of the new representational technology.

In order to follow the students’ understandings he applies diverse forms of exams(qualitative and quantitative), in addition to the students’ participation in classroom dis-course, an array of sources when they seek to give students grades (which are an importantrequirement allowing students to move along their academic paths) and to see theircomprehension of the topic. In this course, the professor developed a qualitative exam of15 min every week where he asked the students to say whether some statements (such as‘‘a system that is in thermal equilibrium is in thermodynamical equilibrium’’ (el sistemaque esta en equilibrio termico esta en equilibrio termodinamico), or ‘‘the intensive vari-ables diminish their value when you diminish the special dimensions of the system’’ (lasvariables intensivas disminuyen cuando se disminuyen las dimensiones especiales delsistema), or ‘‘every heat transference produces a temperature change or the adiabatic workis a function of state’’ (toda transferencia de calor produceun cambio de temperature o eltrabajo adiabatico es una function de estado)) are right or wrong. They also take an exameach time they finish an important topic, so that in a year they have had five of these examsin addition to the problems they have to solve every week. During this course, the professortries to use a new instrument that may help him to better know what kind of problems thestudents face in understanding the topics. He asks the students to write ideas, questions orsummaries about what they have analyzed every week in the classroom. With all these

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tools, he follows diverse students’ processes and representations in order to organize eachsession and in order to grade the students.

The session being analyzed is also full of comments by the professor about the nego-tiations, tricks and aspects to be considered if one is to succeed in the discipline, such as‘‘in thermodynamics one cannot (no se tienen los pelos de la burra en la mano) sayanything until you do the experiment’’ or ‘‘in order to do the experiments you have to waituntil the system is in equilibrium’’ (hay que esperar a que el sistema este en equilibrio parahacer los experimentos). He tells them an anecdote about some supposedly new researchresults presented at a congress; later, the participants realized that the researcher did notallow the system to arrive at equilibrium before beginning the experiment. He also advisesstudents: ‘‘Don’t confound the stationary state with the equilibrium’’ (No confundan elestado estacionario con el equilibrio) and ‘‘Within physics, nothing makes sense if youcannot measure it’’ (En fısica nada tiene sentido si no lo puedes medir). In other words, theprofessor is consciously trying to enroll the students in practices of physics by giving themthe tools needed to move by themselves through the disciplinary networks.

Production of disciplinary trajectories

Another element of the space–time dimensions of the trajectories of physics is the relationof science classes to the real research practice of physicists. Even in the third-semestercourse, this professor is drawing the trajectories of students from early courses to thedisciplinary research work of physics, extending the teaching space of the classroom, as wecan see in the following excerpt.Excerpt 3:

T. … one of the problems that is not yet completely solved isfinding a function for a substance that describes itwhen it is a solid, when it is liquid and when the substanceevaporates, when one of you has a model and anequation for all these you tell me and we publish it together,OK?

St. ha:::: ha::::

Extracto 3:

Mo. de hecho uno de los problemas que todavıa no estacompletamente resuelto es el que tu puedas agarrary decir esta va a ser la funcion para mi sustanciay que esta ecuacion me describa cuando la sustanciasea un solido, que la sustancia sea un lıquido y que lasustancia se evapore… el dıa que alguien tenga un modelitodonde me tenga la ecuacion para todo esome avisa Ok y lo publicamos juntos

As. ja:::: ja::::

This is an example of what I frequently found in several courses, even in the earliestundergraduate courses (Candela 2001), where professors try to interest students in aphysics program by telling them about some of the problems that have not yet been solvedand showing they have some important contributions to make. The professor is mobilizingdistant practices, such as the research problems of physics, to a central position of the


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session. With what is considered a joke by the students (as shown by their laughter), theprofessor also ironically expresses to them some rules of academic publishing as part ofthese disciplinary practices: the students must add the name of the professor to whateverthey publish. In this case the irony is in the way he mentions (‘‘when one of you has amodel… you tell me and we publish it together’’) that they can construct a model and anequation by themselves and publish it with him, suggesting he has not done anything. Inthis way the professor familiarizes the students with problems, research and the rules topublish, showing part of the knowledge cycle of accumulation of physics.

This excerpt shows that, ‘‘face-to-face interaction in specific situations is never just that,instead… are articulated moments in a network of social relations and understandings’’(Massey 1993, pp. 65–66). This is another way of constructing an extended concept of timefor the students, breaking down the walls of the classroom space–time. Taking into accountthese examples, it can be said that classrooms are knots of the disciplinary networks whereextended spaces and times are produced.

The professor also extends the space of the trajectory connecting it to possible tech-nological work related to physics through actions he takes outside the classroom. Heextends the teaching space by inviting his physics students (Two students’ interview 20/11/07) to talk with students of Industrial Design at the same university who are working on thedesign of a small car fueled by hydrogen cells. They talk about the design process and alsoabout the problems they had in constructing the car because of the lack of financialresources and the difficulty of importing the parts they need for its construction. Thepurpose of the visit is to open up new spaces for professional work, giving them alternativejob options in a saturated academic environment (Interview 28/02/08). These are someexamples of extended teaching spaces, so students in one part of the disciplinary network(courses) are interacting with other parts (research spaces). Nespor (1994, p. 134) assessthat ‘‘the mobilizations of students in the disciplinary network are constitutive of powerrelations.’’ So we can say that the professor is making movements through extended partsof the network available for students and with these actions he is empowering them.

However, professors not only move the students along trajectories of representationalpractices of physics. They also make the material spaces of physicists available to students.At the School of Sciences, where this study was carried out, students move about theInstitutes of Physics, Astronomy or Mathematics, as well as the professors’ offices, in orderto consult with them about the specific content of textbooks, exams, homework or anyacademic topics. This is in contrast with what Nespor (1994) reports in his study, carriedout in the U.S., where undergraduate students are not welcome in the material spaces of theinstitutes or in the physicists’ offices at the university. However, there can be importantcontextual (historical, social, cultural and even economic) differences to consider betweenthese but they are beyond the scope of this paper.

Students constructing disciplinary itineraries

I have analyzed segments of students’ trajectories as defined by the institutional structuresor by the professors in order to connect them to distant spaces and times associated with thedisciplinary networks. However, I am especially interested in studying the itinerariesproduced by the students’ own movements through academic networks and also throughtheir participation in non-academic activities at the university (sports, cultural shows,politics) and in everyday life outside of school (family, friends, cultural activities). Stu-dents’ itineraries are produced by the particular ways they connect different worlds of

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knowledge, constructing their identities as physicists with cultural features. Thus, the spaceand time of the discipline also constitute the social construction of actor-network (Latour2005) practices.

There are multiple spaces and times (and space–time) implicated in differentphysical, biological, and social processes. The latter all produce… their own formsof space and time. Processes do not operate in but actively construct space and timeand in so doing define distinctive scales for their development (Harvey 1996, p. 53)

I emphasize the importance of taking into account the initiative of students as educa-tional actors, showing that disciplinary networks of power do not completely define whatthey do and their movements (Candela 1998, 2005). Professors and students can challengeinstitutional constraints; they can negotiate and dialectically re-construct their space andtime scales.

In relation to students’ construction of knowledge, we must recognize that the topic oflearning has been a constant preoccupation, as researchers still lack the tools necessary toconnect specific teaching practices with student outcomes over time and simultaneouslyaccount for learning in other non-classroom spaces (Candela et al. 2004). In this paper,‘‘what we call ‘learning’ are segments of motion which follow the shapes of more stableinstitutional or disciplinary networks’’ (Nespor 1994, p. 131).

The following examples show some students’ movements using representational tech-nologies of physics in the classroom. The first one happens during the session I have beenreferring to. Before beginning to discuss the session topic (introduction to thermody-namics), the professor asks the students if they have had difficulty understanding thehomework problems about fluids. Then one of the students, Julian, asks him:Excerpt 4:

J. what I don’t understand is the difference between doing this(description of the water movement when it goes out of a hose at 45degrees from the horizontal) and the parabolic throw

T. you tell meJ. we::ll, I suppose there is no friction and nothing of thatT. you tell me what the difference isJ. it is the same, isn’t it?St. it must be the sameT. who says it isn’t?

Extracto 4:

J: yo lo que no entiendo es cual es la diferencia entre hacer eso(describir el movimiento del agua saliendo de una manguera a 45grados de la horizontal) y el tiro parabolico

Mo: tu dimeJ: o sea supongo que no hay friccion ni nada de esoMo. tu dime cual es la diferenciaJ: va a ser lo mismo >no?Ao. deberıa ser lo mismoMo: >quien dijo que no lo es?

Julian’s question is interesting because he is relating a fluid problem with a mechanicaldescription from a course they took a year before. This means that the student is focusinghis analysis on the physical phenomenon, not just applying the recent mathematical tools


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given to him in previous classes. He is relating the form of water going out the hose at 45degrees with the form of the trajectory of a solid object thrown in a similar angle. Julian isalso making links between one representational technology (theory) and another, betweenfluid mechanics and classical mechanics, which he has seen in other courses. The activitydescribed in each space has to be transformed into a representation (theory) in order to beable to travel through the disciplinary spaces. Thus, he is making sense of classroom eventsin terms of his larger ongoing academic experience. He is showing the capacity to movethrough the space–time of the discipline using different representational technologies. Inother words, he is moving the representational technologies from another disciplinaryspace–time to this class context, extending space–time to points outside the classroomwalls.

I also want to note that the professor does not answer the question but rather re-addresses it to the student in order to push him to think about the answer by himself. Hefrequently transfers to the students some control, and then some power over their move-ments when he supposes that they can construct the process by themselves. Julian thenlooks for some of the conditions that can make a difference and decides, with some doubt,that the phenomenon is the same. Another student confirms this, with an emphatic ‘‘mustbe,’’ showing that he can take on the role of somebody who knows the answer—that is, thatof an actor who can move between various disciplinary representations.

Students not only participate by following the professor’s discourse during classroominteraction. The dynamics of the class are frequently oriented to the discussions generatedby the students’ questions—for instance: ‘‘Why don’t we have more than one function tocharacterized the state?’’ (>Por que no tenemos mas que una function que caracteriza elestado?); ‘‘Is it the same to have an open or a closed tube?’’ (>Es lo mismo tener un tuboabierto o cerrado?); ‘‘What happens if the fluid is previously moving?’’ (>Que pasa si elfluido se esta moviendo previamente?); ‘‘Why do you make that supposition?’’ (>Por quehace esa suposicion?); ‘‘Can this only be experimentally assessed?’’ (>Esto solo se puedeafirmar experimentalmente?). This is another way that students develop power to negotiateand influence their movements through the space and time of the academic networks,showing initiative and that they are partially in charge of their own movements along thedisciplinary networks. But it also shows that the construction of the itineraries begins witha co-construction of the classroom dynamics with the professor.

The following examples show how students construct their itineraries for use outside ofclass by mobilizing distant spaces and times through a chain of representations based ondifferent academic tasks.

Processes of construction of disciplinary itineraries

Students take notes in the classroom, copying the equations and drawings the professorwrites on the blackboard, including some of the general assertions meant to orient one’sapproach to the topic (such as ‘‘the most important working hypothesis in thermodynamicscould be that our system has to arrive at equilibrium’’ (la hipotesis de trabajo mas im-portante en termodinamica puede ser que nuestro sistema tiene que llegar al equilibrio) or‘‘if we want to understand the propagation speed, we have to learn thermodynamics’’ (siqueremos entender la velocidad de propagacion, tenemos que aprender termodinamica)[Taken from students’ notes]). During a session of 2 h, most of the students—even thoughthere are differences among them, particularly in terms of the amount of explanations theywrite, take fewer than three pages of notes. This is because, in spite of their diversity, theyessentially stabilize the mathematical representation of the problems, avoiding most of the

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everyday examples, general orientations, most part of the explanations, and proposedexperiments (even when they do them as suggested). This probably indicates that math-ematical representations work as a way of synthesizing or generalizing the examples fromreal life in a particular symbolic form that they have to use in order to be able to movethrough the disciplinary network. Even though the students do not write down everythingthe professor says, the notes become guides used to study for tests and to solve homeworkproblems. Notebooks are the stabilized representations of the classroom events that allowstudents to continue in the time and space of the study (Latour 2001).

In the interviews, most of the students said that they study from their notes, from someof the textbooks and articles the professor suggests to them and from some other texts theytake the initiative to look for in the school library. In Mexico, textbooks are importantreferences the students use to study out of the classroom; however, none of the sevenprofessors observed have their classes following just one textbook, in contrast with whatapparently happens in the U.S. and Japan, where teaching is based on the explanation of atextbook (as Nespor reports [1994]). Professors usually develop classes their own way, toconstruct the basic conceptualizations of the course topics. Students therefore have toconstruct their itineraries from classroom discourse by stabilizing some of the represen-tations in their notebooks and then articulating those notes together with other techno-logical artifacts like textbooks and research articles, thereby moving the representations tothe homework problems and the tests.

Some of the students complain about the difficulty of having to establish their own waysof studying, as they do not have a single textbook to follow. However, this process can helpthem develop more initiative in the constitution of their itineraries, as they have to producetheir own conceptualization based on diverse ways of understanding and constructing thephenomena and topics, instead of just by using a particular formulation. If we take poweras the ability to shape actions across space and time, then these practices contribute toempower the students in order to shape their movements. These processes constructcomplex spatial and temporal traces, resulting in differences between students’ itineraries.This self-direction of students’ ways of studying contributes to their developing moreautonomy in their understanding of physics. This is also a manifestation of the constitutionof students as actor-networks that are actors whose activity is networking heterogeneouselements (Callon 1987).

Most of the suggested textbooks for the program are in English, and they are the same,especially for classical physics, as those used in universities in other countries (in the U.S.,as cited in Nespor [1994], and the U.K.) and in other generations (since the 1960s); theseinclude Halliday and Resnick (1966), Ingard and Kraushaar (1961) and Sears andZemansky (1960). This professor also suggests some Mexican textbooks such as the onesby Garcıa-Colın (1990) and Carmona (2007), which were more recently written, or offersbooks not usually used as textbooks, such as ‘‘The Flying Circus of Physics’’ by J. Walter,and articles published in current international research journals. The textbooks are artifactsfull of signs and potential meanings stabilized in time and space and used by severalgenerations of physics students in different parts of the world; they have became nodes inthe actor-network of physics that relate the undergraduate students with extended spacesand times through representations common to the international core discipline.

This community of references allows the international circulation of physicists (theirbodies as well as their representational artifacts, such as articles) for graduate studies (mostof the Mexican students of physics do graduate studies at American or European univer-sities) and their contribution to the social development of an international research agendafrequently connected to the technological needs of those developed countries. Students


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enter with different itineraries within the spatial and temporal networks oriented toward theworld where physics has a structural role for the economy. This constitutes what can beseen as a ‘‘community of practices’’ (Lave and Wenger 1991) that the students become partof as they follow a dense set of practices defined through their itineraries. These studentsmove within international core discipline references (articles and some textbooks), as wellas within some Mexican textbooks written in their own language. This is a very interestingphenomenon culturally that represents the influence of Ramus in US and Japan—whereasapparently not in Mexico (Doll et al. 2005).

Problem solving is an everyday educational practice in physics (in class, in studying, incompleting homework and in taking tests). In order to solve problems that are notmechanical reproductions of already-solved ones, students have to move from an everydaydescription of a problem to the mathematical representation of it, after achieving anintuitive conceptualization of the phenomenon. Then, they have to mobilize these equa-tions to find a solution and change again to everyday representation in order to see if thesymbolic solution makes sense in everyday life. Transformations from one representationalmode to another require students to move among representations of different spaces andtimes as a way of problem solving in physics. Through these practices they are connectingdifferent worlds of knowledge. These practices can be seen as segments of motion alongdisciplinary networks through which they are constructing their own itineraries.

Disciplinary itineraries also differ from one student to another, as each one decides eachsemester which courses to take, how many and on what schedule. The students can alsodecide their particular style of participation in these courses without the choice havingconsequences with regard to their grading. Some follow everyday classes and homework asothers just study by themselves for the final examination. Most of the professors do not takeaway grade points if the students are not attending to the classes. The students just have toshow they know the course topics in someway. An interesting observation in this sense is thatduring the classes there are always students going in and out of the classroomwithout causingany apparent disturbance to the working group. However, there are additional and importantdifferences among students’ itineraries, related to their economic and social backgroundsthat introduce complexities in their movements. For example, 15% of the students—thathave fulfilled a questionnaire at the end of the program—that have left temporally theirstudies for 7 or more years. Those from a low-income backgroundmention family or work asreasons for having stopped their studies. They also express an interest in doing graduatestudies, however, they are not sure they can because of economic impediments.

Additionally, the questionnaires and interviews with graduate students indicate that it iseasier for students that come from families with high cultural capital (Bourdieu 1977) to besuccessful in physics. There is an important percentage of undergraduate students at thisSchool that come from parents who are scientists and have the social and academic tools aswell as the power relations that help them move through the network program. However,cultural capital does not totally determine academic success. Students coming from lowincome families, with not much cultural capital can be successful with more personal effortas we will see in the case of Omar. It is also very helpful if they have emotional supportfrom their families. In Mexico, regardless of income level, families very much valueschooling. Another aspect that helps economically disadvantaged students stay in theprogram is its flexibility. Students can work at the same time they study. For example, 57%of the undergraduate students work during their studies. The consequences are that theytake longer to finish the career or even have to abandon it; however, some of them can bevery successful. Power relations influence but do not completely define students’ itiner-aries. Indeed, there are several complexities that have to be taken into account.

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Collective processes for itineraries constitution

In spite of the differences in the individual itineraries the students construct in movingthrough the different representations (notebooks, textbooks, articles, homework problems,tests), there is a general orientation toward work in groups in order to accomplish academictasks. I have found students with different cultural capital and gender in most of thestudying groups. Even though I have not done an extensive analysis in relation to theseinequalities, it seems that there is not gender discrimination among the groups. There aresome women in the classroom, and in the study groups, that are listened to and arerespected by other students. They are considered as being very intelligent and self confi-dent (as in the case of Rosa and Diana).

Usually, the students try to do the problems individually, and later, they work in groupsin order to collectively help each other with what they could not do alone, to defend theirversion of the solutions in order to find the most economic and elegant ones possible orsimply to check their solutions with others. The solutions to the problems thus go throughanother chain of movements, from individual efforts to the final form frequently resultingfrom collective discussions and diverse interchanges that the students have in the workinggroups. There are differences between the amount of work that students do alone and theamount that they do in the working group, sometimes depending on the academic task,however, these processes can be seen as part of the construction of the itineraries studentsdevelop in order to be able to move within the disciplinary networks. The articulationbetween individual and collective work is one of the very interesting features of the abilityto move through the complex representational technologies of the physics discipline.

In the interviews, as in the questionnaires, Mexican students recognize that workinggroups become more and more important as they advance in the program because tech-nological representations become more difficult to understand when they work alone.Nespor (1994) also realizes the important role that groups play in exchanging opinions andhelping each other to do what is difficult for one person working alone. Some of thestudents recognize that without the group, they could not survive in the program—even atthe beginning—because of the enormous effort it demands. Study groups can work duringthe day at the library, in empty classrooms, at a coffee shop or even on the green spacesthat surround the school buildings and frequently at night in students’ homes. In this way,social processes generated within the study groups produce their own forms of space andtime. This fact makes working groups become a knot of concentration for the production ofthe students’ itineraries, as they link an important number of students’ constructions ofdisciplinary representations.

Other spaces where physicists mobilize their constructed representations of the worldare physics conferences where they present the results of their research and get in touchwith physicists from other countries and institutions. So, conferences are part of the dis-ciplinary network. It is interesting that one of the students from the same third-semestergroup—Omar, an18-year-old boy who comes from a low income family (His father is anaccountant’s assistant at Wal-Mart, and his mother works in a pharmacy. Both have onlybasic education)—together with students in more advanced grades, presented a paper aboutfriction at the National Congress of Physics in 2007. These are the Congresses where theMexican physicists present the results of their research, in addition to the internationalpresentations they do at more specialized conferences. However, these congresses providethe opportunity for students to present works mainly as results from experimental studies.The professor of mechanics from a previous course helped them, but they did the pre-sentation based on their own initiative. In this way, Omar, for example, is constructing his


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own itinerary by choosing his partners, the topic to be presented in the public space; theway to do this and even the individuals whom he and his team ask for help. This particularevent is important because it shows students’ movements towards participation in thediscipline network. It is another example of the particular development of individual andcollective work in order to accomplish academic tasks, extending the spaces and timesassociated with the regular curricular activities.

Extending the disciplinary itineraries

Undergraduate students in Mexico also develop more extended networks than the disci-plinary and institutional ones by getting involved in other continuous activities dependingon their possibilities, needs, and interests. For example, Omar stays 14 h a day at theuniversity—where, in addition to his involvement in the physics program, where he getsgood grades, he studies Latin at the School of Philosophy and practices fencing twice aweek, both at the UNAM. He does this in spite of the economic pressures he experiencesbased on family needs, even though his family encourages him to study. A middle classstudent, Lilia, whose father is an architect and whose mother is an accountant, stays from 9a.m. to 9 p.m. at the university, where in addition to her physics courses; she goes tocontemporary dance classes twice a week and takes French everyday. After her classes, sheusually spends some time with her boyfriend and has dinner with her mother. In spite oftheir different cultural capital this School of Sciences opens new opportunities for culturalactivities to students. A teacher told me that he knows students of physics from otherMexican universities that move to the UNAM because ‘‘it has more cultural activities and abetter myriad for academic discussions’’ (hay mas actividades culturales y un mejor am-biente academico para las discusiones) (Interview 24/02/08).

From the student questionnaires I administered in the last courses of the program, Ifound that 65% of the students have done other studies at the same time as they havestudied physics (languages, music, theater, film studies, mathematics, engineering), and77% have participated continuously in extracurricular activities (sports, haki, circusactivities, chess, music, films clubs, teaching or paid work). These data show that studyingphysics at the University usually requires more time than previous levels of schooling;however, students’ presence at the university also connects them to new activities, newspaces for practice and new social relationships. The students construct their own itiner-aries in relation to their interests, possibilities, and power relations, and create new con-ditions by extending the spatial and temporal networks of the discipline.

As they advance in the program, most of the students consider the study group to be notonly a support for them as they seek to complete academic tasks but also the center of theirnew social relationships, because they usually share political, cultural and social interestswith the individuals in the study group and, together, will enjoy non-academic activitieslike concerts, sports, dinners and parties.

Constructing students’ autonomy to move along the disciplinary networks of physics

In the previous descriptions, I have shown the ways in which a ‘‘good’’ professor of physicsat a Mexican university (UNAM) enrolls students into the extended networks of physics asa discipline. The examples show how classrooms can be understood as having porous wallsbreaking its bounded space and time, so that the students are interacting with the practicesof ‘‘real physics’’ at the same time they are moving through a chain of technological

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representations from the classroom to the outside academic activities. Through specificactions (such as explaining representational technologies, presenting unsolved problems,suggesting recent articles to read) as well as involvement in activities outside the classroom(visiting car designers, providing opportunities for participation at academic spaces likecongresses), professors connect newcomers, even during the first year of the program, to awide range of ongoing activities related to the physics community of practice (Lave andWenger 1991). These practices are more important in promoting mobility and control overmobility both reflecting and reinforcing students’ power (Massey 1993, p. 61).

Classrooms appear as knots of connection where other spaces and times are producedthrough diverse representational technologies. We have seen how both, discourse andrepresentational artifacts, such as textbooks, problems and equations, shape practicethrough the movement of distant disciplinary space–times as the real world of physics.Lave and Wenger (1991, p. 101) state that ‘‘understanding the technology of practice ismore than learning to use tools; it is a way to connect with the history of the practice and toparticipate more directly in its cultural life.’’ We have found Mexican students understandthis technology of practice, however, Lave and Wenger (1991) do not take into accountpower relations within the discursive network and its extensions to everyday contexts. Wehave seen those power relations have important influence in students’ movements and intheir itineraries.

The students’ movements through material spaces (buildings, institutes, offices) andrepresentational activities (classes, homework, tests, research problems, conferences)construct the itineraries that entangled them into the space–time of the disciplinary net-works as the realm of physics. The disciplinary networks also link undergraduate studentswith distant sites, like the international core programs, through common artifacts such astraditional textbooks and recently published research articles.

All of this representational production constitutes the trajectories and networks ofinstitutional power through which students move, as Nespor (1994) reports. However, thereare cultural features of Mexican trajectories and itineraries associated with undergraduatephysics that have been described in the paper.

One of these cultural features is the way in which Mexican professors prepare theirclasses. The professors I have studied frequently organize the sessions around a problem.They prepare the classes by taking into account multiple textbooks, articles, and their ownteaching and research experience as reference points. They also organize sessions aroundthe difficulties that they have found students experience. These teaching practices con-tribute to the constitution of actor-networks with a more autonomous capacity than thosedeveloped by professors who give their lessons only by explaining one textbook in multipleways. Students develop autonomous competence, and so, power to move along the dis-ciplinary networks because, after class, they have to organize, both individually and col-lectively, complex articulations of representations. They have to combine differentrepresentations of particular content that has been stabilized within several representationalartifacts (notebooks, diverse textbooks, research articles, etymological roots, their ownexperience). In order to make those articulations, they need to develop a greater capacityfor self-direction and self-mobility through the physics networks than would be necessaryif they were to follow one textbook. Their own movement through different representationsof the same concepts and theories are constitutive of power relations and also leads them toattain better comprehension and contribute to the constitution of the actor-networks. Thecollective work within the study groups becomes a knot of the students’ itineraries becauseit supports an important activity for students’ production of space–time as they are problemsolving.


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Differences in cultural capital influence students’ itineraries facilitating their move-ments; however, none of the students I interviewed think of them as determinant. Familysupport is also an important extension of the disciplinary network that in Mexico is arelevant help for economically disadvantaged students’ movements. There is another caseof a graduate student, Jose who completed one postgraduate degree in Florida and wasdoing another in Granada, Spain, even though his family members had minimal academicbackground and were from the low middle class. He also wrote articles for NASA’swebpage.

The analysis in this paper also reveals the collaborative orientation of the professor.This orientation is common among other professors I have studied in this department.Through his discourse, he tends to include the students as actors in the classroom eventsproviding them with some control over their movements. His use of very colloquial andironic expressions, as well as his gestures and strong degree of interaction with the stu-dents, serves to construct this collaborative orientation. His teaching practice thus tends tosupport the co-construction and negotiation of the institutional trajectories contributing tothe constitution of actor-networks.

Another interesting feature of this professor’s practice is the multiple tools he uses toevaluate those students who attend classes regularly. He grades them based on the weeklyhomework problems, weekly comments about aspects of the lessons, participation inclassroom activities, weekly 15-min qualitative quizzes and exams presented after eachgeneral topic. The diversity of representational languages (oral and textual discourse, themathematical resolution of problems, qualitative conceptualizations) helps students movethrough different modes of representation of the discipline’s central concepts. These aresome ways in which this professor makes representational changes over time and spacerelevant to students in order to produce awareness about time and space.

All of these characteristics of the professor’s instructional practices, in addition to avery flexible curricular structure, contribute to the constitution of the students’ identities assufficiently competent to construct an autonomous way of organizing space and timewithin the discipline. In the above analysis, students appear as active agents; their identityand movements are not just pre-established. In this way, Mexican students seem to takeinitiative and develop power as they are more in charge of the construction of theiritineraries than are undergraduate students of physics in the U.S., as reported by Nespor, inthe sense proposed by Massey:

Different social groups have distinct relationships to this [the power in relation to theflows and the movement] anyway-differentiated mobility: some are more in chargeof it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more onthe receiving end of it than others (Massey 1993 p. 61).

Nespor (1994) also describes how undergraduate trajectories of physics at the universitythat he studied narrowed students’ material organization of their space and time, forcingthem into exclusivity and concentration on their formal training and preventing them fromcontinuing with previous connections to other social and cultural activities. They were alsolimited in their opportunities to move about the material spaces of physicists (buildings thatwere part of the institutes, professors’ offices). Contextual and cultural features of theuniversities and the programs can explain these differences. However, other cultural fea-tures of Mexican students’ trajectories can be noticed such as that it is quite usual to findthem at the research institutes and in all kinds of physicist spaces. Their itineraries alsoopen up new spaces of cultural and social practices, creating more extensive networks tiedto disciplinary ones. During the first year, students have to abandon social and cultural

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activities outside of school; however, during the rest of the program, a number of studentsexplore other studies at the same time as physics. Of the students, 77% continuouslyparticipate in extracurricular sports, social and cultural activities, and some even work inpaid jobs during their studies. As a result, the space and time of their itineraries areexpanded to encompass other social and cultural activities. The professor whose course Ihave been describing told me that something came to his attention when he arrived atTemple University in Philadelphia, for his graduate studies—that the students spent muchless time on-campus than in Mexico, though their collective and cultural activities weremuch more reduced

In addition, cultural features related to the history of this school and the economic roleof physics and technology within a dependent country could be part of the explanation forthe differences found in this analysis among the undergraduate physics programs in the twoplaces. In Mexico, physics is not related to economic centers of power as it is in the USA.This fact changes the trajectories of physics forcing the students to look for networks thatcan serve as alternatives for their future to those of graduate studies of physics, such as thetechnological applications like the car designers they visit with the professor. An orien-tation that facilitates the training of more autonomous and empowered students might alsoresult from the interest that professors at UNAM have in helping their students face thedifficult experience of doing graduate studies at universities in more developed countries.Most of the professors have gone through the experience of competing under the disad-vantageous conditions that they may encounter when they continue their studies in foreigncountries: problems of language competence, lack of collective support from peers and theneed to adapt to a new context. Another possible explanation may be the particularsociocultural background of Mexican pre-university schooling, where collaborativeteaching/learning practices are common (Candela 1995, 1999).

Finally, I found this theoretical approach particularly useful in integrating time andspace as dimensions of classroom studies for the purpose of analyzing students’ paths toknowledge construction understood as their movements following disciplinary networks aswell as reconstructing them. Through these concepts, classrooms appear as settings withporous borders, and events are seen as movements articulated in networks of social rela-tions and understandings. The approach can also provide a method of analyzing culturaland historical dimensions of classrooms and disciplinary practices.

Acknowledgments I acknowledge the important editing work of Alejandro Gallard, the reflections ofAjda Kahveci and Mara Zapata, the help of Jimena Turrent and Lucia Mendoza in the recollection ofinformation and, all the collaboration of the professors, students and the Dean of the School of Sciences.

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Author Biography

Antonia Candela is a professor in the Educational Research Department of the Center for Research andAdvanced Studies at Mexico. She received her Ph.D. in Educational Research working with Derek Edwardsat Loughborough University, UK. The focus of Dr. Candela’s work is in ethnographies and discourseanalyses of science classes focusing on students’ participation. She has published articles on her topics ofinterest: ‘‘construction of scientific facts,’’ ‘‘argumentation,’’ ‘‘consensus construction’’ and ‘‘studentpower.’’ She has participated in four national reform processes in curriculum development and as an authorof science programs and science textbooks. She has published two books: ‘‘La necesidad de entender,explicar y argumentar: Los alumnos de primaria en la actividad experimental’’. (The need for understand,explain and argument: The students of elementary school and the experimental activities) (CINVESTAV/SEP. 1997) and ‘‘Ciencia en el aula: Los alumnos entre la argumentacion y el consenso’’ (Science in theclassroom: Students between argumentation and consensus construction) (Paidos, 1999).


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Time and space: undergraduate Mexican physics in motion

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