Educating for discovery: toward a modern undergraduate physics curriculum

It’s been more than 50 years since the last sustained national effort to review and reform the undergraduate physics curriculum. The intervening years have seen pedagogical advances, as well as initiatives focused on specific areas of the curriculum (e.g. laboratories beyond the introductory sequence, computation, and physics for life sciences). But although the world, and the practice of physics, has changed significantly in the last half-century, the structure of the physics curriculum has changed little in most places. Is the current curriculum serving our students (and the world we live in) as well as it could be? What future(s) should we be preparing physics students for? How do we think about curricular reform in the face of the challenges and constraints we all face? I will discuss some of these recent curricular initiatives as well as some thoughts from preliminary conversations with members of the physics teaching community about the possibility of broader curricular reform.