Undergraduate students often encounter great difficulties in understanding Ohm’s law and electrical
circuits. Considering the widespread students’ beliefs and their common mistakes, as they come out
from the literature and our teaching experience, we think that a relevant source of these problems
comes from the fact that electrical circuits are generally treated separately from the other topics
of electromagnetism, with poor reference to the circulation of the electric field. We present here a
way to deal with electrical circuits that could help students to overcome their difficulties. In our
approach, the electric field is the protagonist and the mathematical tool the students are asked to
use is its circulation. In the light of the circulation of the electric field, the experimental
Ohm’s law is revisited, the concept of electromotive force is discussed and some suggestions to
eliminate common misconceptions about the role of a battery in a circuit are presented.