Embodied Epistemic Claims in Educational Settings

• In Event: Discursive Practice and Knowledge Construction in Mathematics Classrooms in Widely Different Cultural Settings

Abstract

The focus for this paper is a concern with how people in interaction in educational settings claim to know things, and how these epistemic stances, as an integrated aspect of learning, can be found to change over time. The analysis is situated within recent understandings of learning and development as social and situated (e.g. Enfield & Levinson, 2006; Lave & Wenger, 1991).

Epistemic stances, that is, participants’ ways of marking attitudes toward knowledge and how it was obtained, are the primary means by which students and teachers can establish, sustain, and question intersubjectivity in teaching situations. Moreover, they are an important resource for teachers when assessing students’ actions. Epistemic stance emerges from interaction between participants in particular dialogic and sequential contexts; it is a public action that is shaped by the talk and stances of other participants in sequentially unfolding turns-at-talk (Kärkkäinen, 2006). Participants thus socially establish epistemic ecologies of teaching and learning.

Recently completed and on-going work (e.g. Melander, 2009; Sahlström, forthcoming) shows that participants use a variety of resources for situating their actions within a trajectory of past, concurrent, and projectable change. These resources include verbal and non-verbal epistemic stance markers, such as syntax and prosody, and gestures and other embodied displays.

Previous research has shown that human action is built through the use of many different kinds of interactional resources. Participants use semantic, syntactic, and prosodic features of talk, gestures, gaze, and body posture, and resources in the surrounding material environment when participating in social interaction (e.g. Goodwin, 2000). Most commonly, analysis of epistemic stance has been focused on verbal aspects of knowledge claims. In this paper, we intend to expand notions of epistemic stance beyond the verbal and lexically oriented analyses and, in line with the above-mentioned research, focus on the role of gesture, prosody, and the use of and interaction with artifacts in the epistemic ecologies of the studied situations (cf. Goodwin, 2007).

Providing empirical ground for the analyses are video recordings of mathematics lessons focusing on how teachers and students are working with linear equations. In the analyses we demonstrate how epistemic stance is produced and oriented to and how the student in different ways is positioning himself as knowing some things and as being ignorant of others. This in turn has consequences for how the participants co-construct the content of learning.

The participants are demonstrated to be highly sensitive to nonverbal epistemic claims and the ongoing interaction is shaped by moment-by-moment adjustments in relation to them. The participants have a number of resources available to them, not least prosodic, where they are shown to orient to slight changes in the production of discursive tokens (mhm, yes, etc.) displaying in minimal albeit efficient ways whether a shared understanding of the learning task at hand is arrived at. This in turn is shown to have consequences for the co-construction of knowledge and the constitution of trajectories of learning.

Authors

• Fritjof Sahlstrom, University of Helsinki

• Helen Melander, Uppsala University