Epistemic Heterogeneity: Seeing Students' Epistemic Navigations

• In Event: 63.036 - Young People Shaping Science Practice in and out of Classrooms: Implications for Teaching and Learning

Abstract

There has been a widespread call to improve science education, particularly for those groups of children who have traditionally underachieved. A key aspect of study within science education for over two decades has been to support students development and participation in the key epistemic orientations to science sometimes referred to as developing students’ views of the nature of science (VNOS). While this is an important area of research, I argue that there have been three dominant ways in which the epistemic orientations that students’ develop in their everyday lives and bring to formal learning environments have been theorized, studied, or positioned in learning environments and further that all three of these approaches may be reifying the problems of improving science education particularly for those students’ from non-dominant backgrounds. The three categories of approaches found in the literature I characterize include: epistemic absence, epistemic inferiority, and epistemic productivity. I argue that while this third category has transformed our understandings of epistemology and cognition in powerful ways (e.g. Hammer & Elby, 2002), it has reinscribed elements of the epistemic inferiority tradition when applied to learning environments and creates tensions between home or community epistemologies and those privileged in school environments. Further, I argue that work in science education has under-considered consider the kinds of epistemic shifts required of children even within formal school settings across disciplines (a noteable exception Schommer & Walker, 1995)
Drawing from the “productive epistemology” work and work in border-crossing (Aikenhead, 1996) this paper explores a fourth possibility, epistemic navigation, which considers the ways in which individuals navigate in, between and through epistemic heterogeneity (Bang, in process). A navigational framing of epistemology, I argue, provides for a more robust understanding of epistemology and learning and may help to develop more affective learning environments. To explore this orientation I present a microanalysis of three adult-child interactions. The first is of an adult-child interaction in which the child is 4 years old and they are playing with a forest diorama. The second interaction focuses on an adult-child interaction during a forest walk. The third interaction focuses on teacher’s launch of lesson in a novel learning environment and the subsequent conversation. I find that in both of these cases children and adults are routinely engaged in epistemic shifts that carry epistemic implications. I focus on how these shifts shape and reshape one contour of epistemology, specifically the scope of knowledge, in each interaction and the scope of inferential and evidential reasoning that unfolds. Further I consider how these epistemic shifts are related to the ways in which professional scientists engage in work. I end by tracing the implications for this framework in relation to the next generation science standards.

Author

• Megan Bang, University of Washington