How Can Teachers Authentically Use Students' Culturally Based Intellectual Resources to Promote Epistemic Agency?

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

Abstract

Problems and Objectives
Students’ lived-experiences and culturally-based intellectual resources must to be used for knowledge-building in agentive classrooms (Warren, et. al. 2001). But many students’ resources may be experienced as discontinuous with school science, and unanticipated by the teacher. This paper explores approaches that connect these resources to the science learning goals in school, and explores how they offer both affordances that promote the students’ epistemic agency, and challenges therein.

Theoretical Framework and Methods
The research community has created numerous “resource pedagogies” (Paris, 2012) that describe how to go about soliciting, valuing and building-on students’ intellectual resources and lived experiences. We discuss these options with respect to the affordances of, and challenges to, opening-up spaces for epistemic agency in sensemaking.

Findings
The Funds of Knowledge Framework connects the content goals to the historically accumulated skills and expertise from the students’ community that are related to maintaining well-being (i.e., Moll, et.al., 1992). This approach promotes epistemic agency by positioning the students’ cultural knowledge as curricular content and valuing community expertise in the school, but it does not necessarily shift them away from a transmission model of education.

Other frameworks, such as expansive interpretative power (Rosebery, et. al., 2015), place responsibility on the teacher to interpret and connect students’ science ideas to the learning goals. For example, McNeill (2008), describes teachers’ questioning practices as being pivotal in soliciting students’ lived experiences as evidence in argumentation. In these resource pedagogies, the teacher enables agency by positioning students’ ideas and lived-experiences as useful for shared knowledge-building. However, some ideas and lived-experiences are necessarily foregrounded and others, which the teacher does not anticipate or understand, become sidelined, which may inhibit epistemic agency, as well.

Another series of resource pedagogies come from a critical stance. These use authentic concerns of the community to address content learning goals (Buxton, 2010; Basu & Barton, 2007), thereby soliciting and valuing diverse socio-political perspectives (Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2014). While a powerful approach, it requires that teachers are aware of the complexity surrounding the relationship(s) between the socio-political consciousness of the community with the “objectivity of science.”

Significance
As it becomes increasingly apparent that epistemic agency is dependent on leveraging students’ intellectual resources (Author, 2014), classroom-based research that locates opportunities for epistemic agency within resource pedagogies is needed. This paper explores a tension that needs to be resolved in order to achieve this goal. In particular, each of the resource pedagogies assumes compatibility of student culturally-based intellectual resources and lived-experiences on the one hand, and epistemic agency on the other. However, for them to be compatible, students must recognize the resource as theirs, when it is translated to the school-setting. To do so, the teacher must maintain authenticity of these resources and anticipate and manage multiple resources. Thus, each of these approaches raises the question: How does the transplanting of a cultural resources to school-based contexts enable and prohibit epistemic agency?

Authors

• Emily Miller, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Leema G. Berland, University of Wisconsin - Madison