Teacher as Learner: Supporting Students' Intellectual Authority in the Classroom

• In Event: Epistemic Agency and Equity

Abstract

This paper characterizes how an expert 8th grade science teacher, Mr. M., navigates the complexities of supporting students’ intellectual authority by taking on a disposition as a learner. I claim that by positioning himself as a learner who is also grappling to make sense of the collective phenomena central to the class investigation, he sends implicit messages about how the students are expected to participate in the classroom. These messages shift the classroom dynamics such that students take on intellectual work. This analysis characterizes how he enacts this disposition discursively, and how students take up this position in their own knowledge construction over the course of a 4-month unit.

Authors

• Susan Bromley Kelly, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Christina Krist, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign