How Can Students Have Epistemic Agency When They Have Not Identified What to Learn?

• In Event: 32.064 - Achieving Epistemic Justice by Enabling Epistemic Agency

Abstract

Problem and Objectives
In traditional science classrooms, an external authority selects the learning goals. This approach constrains opportunities for students to act with epistemic agency because: students are not agentive in the selection of what to learn; the teacher has the sole authority to evaluate the students’ ideas; and students are typically encouraged to ask clarifying questions, rather than pushing the ideas.

Which raises the question: How do we position students as epistemic agents who can construct and evaluate knowledge while simultaneously continuing to position canonical scientific content (the “right answer”) as a primary goal of instruction? Or can we?

Theoretical Framework and Methods
While many researchers have tacit answers to this epistemological bind, few studies explicitly address it. We explore the relationship between students’ epistemic agency and learning goals that is implied by current trends in science education. To do so, we examine how different pedagogical practices provide opportunities for students and teachers to be equipped, expected, and empowered to engage in various aspects of epistemic decision-making. This decision-making involves not only deciding the focal learning goals and why, but also when to pursue those goals, who can question the emergent ideas, and how these ideas will be evaluated.

Findings: Three Trends and Their Implications
Learning Progressions. Learning environments that follow learning progressions (Alonzo & Gotwals, 2012) are expected to position students to construct the target knowledge such that anticipated misconceptions are addressed through a natural progression along the designed path. Thus, students are set-up to ask questions that align with the target learning goals. This approach can potentially enable epistemic agency because, in the ideal case, students experience their questions and ideas as influential. However, if teachers view the progression as a script to follow, it might also reduce student agency.

Emphasize epistemological goals. When educators focus on the students’ reasoning and epistemological understandings, rather then their canonical understandings, students use the epistemological criteria to decide which ideas are accepted or valued (Author & colleagues 2008; Sandoval & Çam, 2011). As such, emphasizing sensemaking criteria positions students as epistemic agents that can evaluate and question the ideas being constructed. Questions about this approach surround who selects the criteria and are addressed in Paper 2.

Content goals as tools. If we reframe learning goals as tools students use to figure out something in the world (Papert, 1980; Rosebery et al., 2010), the teacher would not correct a student’s misunderstanding until, and only if, it got in the way of their sensemaking. In this case, since the canonical knowledge is not the goal of the students’ intellectual work, the correction does not disrupt students’ agency any more then asking an expert in science studies disrupts our agency to explore student engagement in scientific practices.

Significance
This analysis suggests that we, as a field must more fully understand the tradeoffs associated with ways of fostering epistemic agency while working towards established learning goals. Without unpacking this complexity, we will continue struggling to design learning environments in which students are actively sensemaking.

Authors

• Rosemary Russ, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Leema G. Berland, University of Wisconsin - Madison