Dave Bonner

I am in my 6th year teaching physics at Hinsdale South High School in a southwest suburb of Chicago. I teach calculus-based AP physics, 11th-grade physics, as well as freshman honors physics. In addition to teaching, I am working towards my Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Chicago. All of my coursework is complete, and I am currently in my dissertation phase with intentions to graduate in 2010. My interest is multimodality in the classroom. I study the various communicative media (or representations, such as written, verbal, diagrammatic, mathematical, pictorial, and artifactual and material) used by both the teacher and students in different classroom contexts. I am hoping to better understand how such experiences shape teaching and learning as a social construct.

Besides my graduate work, an article I wrote for The Physics Teacher was accepted and published in the November 2009 edition. The article delineates a constructivist lesson where students build functional electrical power strips from scratch using household outlets and switches. The idea of this lesson stemmed from my laboratory experience with Samir Bali, where I simply had to build a power strip for the lab in 2001.

"Miami's opportunities for research and apprenticeship gave me invaluable experiences that gave me a love for science and shaped my career in high school physics teaching."  David C. Bonner, BS Physics 2002, Master's in Teaching 2003