ABSTRACT
Imagine […] a university student working in a dormitory room on a physics problem […] The space of the classroom is extended into the student’s residence, and the student’s out-of-school time is synchronized not just with the professor’s pacing of course materials, but also to an institutional calendar, which organizes ‘learning’ into arbitrary units of time like semesters, and semesters into multi-year programmes of study. There are also links between the space–time of the problem-solving and anticipated evaluated events elsewhere in the future. At the same time, insofar as the problem solving is part of a ‘course’, there are connections to previous physics or math courses the student has taken where similar problem forms, tasks, and concepts were encountered. There are also connections to disciplinary sites where ‘physics problems’ are constructed and warranted […] and to physics courses around the world where the same or isomorphic problems are assigned […] The physics problem is not so much an ‘articulated’ moment as a moving articulation, the translation of a succession of place-makings, enrolments, decontextualization and recontextualization, temporally unfolding from secondary school onward.
