First-Grade Students as Epistemic Agents in Engineering at a High-Needs Elementary School

• In Event: 47.029 - Epistemic Cognition and Reasoning in Science Learning

Abstract

Students in high-needs schools often lack opportunities to be epistemic agents. We asked: How do first grade students in a high-needs school emerge as epistemic agents during an engineering unit? With video and interview analysis, we ethnographically studied a 20-day engineering unit in a classroom with a predominantly minoritized population. Learning activities that offered most opportunities for epistemic agency included uncertainty; began with a focus on the material world and transformed into more abstract ideas; and provided opportunities for everyday sensemaking. Instruction sent the following epistemological messages: all students have “good thinking”; knowledge is emergent; knowledge production is not linear; epistemic authority can be shared. This study speaks back to the perceived epistemological impoverishment in primary-grade STEM in high-needs schools.

Authors

• Heidi Carlone, University of North Carolina - Greensboro

• Alison Kay Mercier, University of North Carolina - Greensboro

• Salem Rainey Metzger, University of North Carolina - Greensboro