Today's guest blogger, Misty Bentz, is an Assistant (nay, Associate!)
Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Georgia State
University. Misty
is an expert at making black hole mass measurements using reverberation
mapping techniques, which she uses to study the broad line region and
the relationship between AGN and their host galaxies. Misty's post is
the second in a new series of blogs (the first is here) that describe
how instructors tackle social justice issues in their physics and
astronomy classrooms.
For the past few years, I have been teaching a required course for entering physics majors, “Gateway to Physics”, at Georgia State University. The course is intended to introduce students to the wide world of exciting physics research and (hopefully) kindle their enthusiasm for studying physics even as they work through their introductory courses.
To this end, we don’t spend time solving problems about balls rolling down inclined planes. Instead, the course is formatted as a seminar that meets once per week for 2 hours and is centered around visits from physics and astronomy faculty, each visitor spending an hour discussing their research and their physics subfield. The students also have semester-long group projects where they independently explore a physics topic to learn the current state of the field (past topics have included wormholes, spacecraft propulsion, extremophiles, quantum computing, biomimicry, and skyscraper design). The last meeting of the semester is a “behind the scenes” tour of several physics research labs.
