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

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

Abstract

Problem and Objectives
In “best practice” curricula, students are actively engaged in “scientific practices.” They construct explanations, justify ideas, and revise their thinking and experiments in light of feedback from peers. In this sense, students act with epistemic agency. However, when we unpack how particular practices are identified as appropriate targets for instruction, and then how they are introduced and established in the classroom community, it is clear that an emphasis on practices does not necessarily create opportunities for students to act with epistemic agency. This paper explores these complexities.

Theoretical framework and methods
To address the relationship between scientific practices and agency, I make use of a socio-cultural perspective that positions practices as one component of activity systems and emphasizes that practices are developed in communities for the purpose of solving problems and meeting goals (e.g., Wenger, 1998). This perspective problematizes the common instructional sequence in which students are engaged in doing the learning, but researchers and teachers decide on how they should learn. In this paper, I raise central questions we, as a research community, must address if we are to position scientific practices as practices for students in ways that enable them to act with agency,

Findings: Three Key Questions
Questioning and justifying how we determine the practices in which we ask students to engage. Researchers and educators exercise considerable agency when we choose a “scientific practice” as the target of instruction and determine what appropriate participation from students might look like. How can scientific practices limit students’ agency, inadvertently devaluing students’ ways of sensemaking (Bang et. al, 2012; Author, 2014)?

Positioning students’ practices as continuous or discontinuous with scientific practices. Once the target practices are identified researchers work to relate them to existing student practices. Many papers on scientific practices (e.g., Ryu and Sandoval, 2012; Sampson & Clark, 2011) describe the challenges students face when enacting desired forms of practices. Others have focused on describing how the practices students bring to the classroom can serve as resources for the desired practices (e.g., Hudicourt-Barnes, 2003). How can we understand the differences between the students’ and scientific practices without taking a deficit-oriented position?

Acknowledging the contextual nature of practice. If we take practices to be context dependent, it is clear that students might not enact scientific practices in the target ways not because they don’t know how to, but because doing so would not achieve their goals (Ryu and Sandoval, 2012; Author, 2011, Author, 2015). Can we judge students’ enactment of desired practice without looking at the interplay between the student and the designed environment? How can we help students take up practices as tools for work that they find important?

Significance
The questions that this paper poses have no easy answers, but we must explore them if we hope for scientific practices to enable students to act with epistemic agency rather being instantiated in classrooms as skills that reinforce traditional roles.

Author

• Eve Manz, Boston University