I suggest that incorporating teachi

I suggest that incorporating teaching strategies from Aesthetic Education in introductory college physics can assist students in overcoming some of the difficulties of entry into physics that are associated with the way physicists use language. The discourse of science presents borders that separate sci- ence, particularly physics, as a speech community (Gumperz, 1968) by virtue of its specialized language. The discourse of physics, which includes the lan- guage of mathematics, sets physicists apart as a privileged group (Traweek, 1988), which often leads to a general mistrust of physicists (Bazerman, 2000), yet, in order to understand physics, students must first learn to use language in the way physicists do (Hestenes, 1998; May & Etkina, 2002). This language barrier can be especially problematic for minority culture students (Aikenhead, 2002; Brown, Kloser, & Henderson, 2010; Lee, 2003; Phelan et al., 1993).
According to the Multiple Worlds Theory of Phelan et al. (1993), students from minority culture home worlds must make a transition to the dominant culture of the school world, with language being one of the barriers. Corson (2001) discussed the use of ‘‘high status vocabulary’’ as being problematic for minority culture students in dominant culture schools and recommended that managing discourses in school can be a powerful means of ameliorating inequalities. I suggest that the dominant position of sciences over arts in edu- cation resembles the hegemonic positioning of majority and minority culture students as described by Phelan et al.
Eisner (2002) describes the origins of the cultural dominance of science over the arts as arising from the Enlightenment period in Western society, which was heavily influenced by the emergence of Newtonian physics: