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The paper deals with physics teaching/learning in high school. An investigation in three upper secondary school classes in Italy explored the reactions of students to a structuring lecture on optics within the discipline-culture (DC) framework that organises physics knowledge around four interrelated fundamental theories of light. The lecture presented optics as an unfolding conceptual discourse of physicists regarding the nature of light. Along with the knowledge constructed in a school course of a scientific lyceum, the students provided epistemological comments, displaying their perception of physics knowledge presented in the classroom. Students’ views and knowledge were investigated by questionnaires prior to and after the lecture and in special discussions held in each class. They revealed a variety of attitudes and views which allowed inferences about the potential of the DC framework in an educational context. The findings and interpretation indicate the positive and stimulating impact of the lecture and the way in which DC-based approach to knowledge organization makes physics at school cultural and attractive

This paper aims to identify and tackle some problems related to teaching quantum field theory (QFT) at university level. In particular, problems arising from the canonical quantization are addressed by focusing on the Klein–Gordon equation (KGE). After a brief description of the status of the KGE in teaching as it emerges from an analysis of a selected sample of university textbooks, an analysis of the applications of the KGE in contexts different from the QFT is presented. The results of the analysis show that, while in the real case the solutions of the equation can be easily interpreted from a physical point of view, in the complex case the coherence with relativistic quantum mechanics and the electrodynamics framework brings to light interpretative problems related to the classical complex KG field. The comparison between the classical cases investigated and the QFT framework, where the equation finds a coherent particle interpretation, leads to share Ryder's statement asserting that the KG field is a ‘strictly quantum field’. Implications of the results in terms of remarks about the canonical procedure currently utilized for teaching are underlined.

Within physics education research a number of teaching proposals aimed at introducing elements of particle physics into secondary-school and introductory-university-level courses have been produced in recent years. Many of them face the problem of introducing the notion of the quantum field, which has a central role in contemporary physics. In this paper two representative examples are discussed; it is shown that both of them take the standard approach to introducing quantum field theory at university level (the ‘canonical quantization approach’) as their reference and that at the same time they introduce some ideas regarding quantum fields that are problematic when recent studies of the foundations of quantum field theory are taken into account. Starting from recent reformulations of quantum field theory, a different perspective to the notion of the quantum field is presented and a certain number of original insights that seem to be promising from a teaching perspective are emphasized.

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