Empowering Youth in Sustainability Issues Through Epistemic Agency

• In Event: Epistemic Justice Across Learning Environments

Abstract

Purpose/Theoretical Framework
Many science teachers and researchers aim to position students with epistemic agency—the power to “shap[e] the knowledge and practice of a community” (Stroupe, 2014, p. 488). However, this often collapses to pseudoagency (Miller et al., 2018), in which students’ ideas are validated only when they align with canonical science. For epistemic justice, where all students’ knowledge is valued, students need authority to produce knowledge, pursue their own goals, and “grapple with…uncertainties” (Penuel and Watkins, 2019, p. 205). Because epistemic justice requires epistemic agency, we analyze how students perceived and enacted their agency in a workshop that strived to position them as true epistemic agents.

Data Sources/Analysis
Over a six-session workshop, twenty-eight 9th graders designed mixed-reality activities to teach younger students about sustainability (see Figure 1). We video-recorded the sessions and collected written reflections. Using Interaction Analysis (Jordan and Henderson, 1995), we analyzed selected interactions during the sessions, focusing on the framing of the design challenge and moments of friction between researcher and student ideas. This illuminated how students experienced epistemic agency. Analyses of transcripts and student reflections offer insight into how students perceived their agency.

Results/Significance
Researchers introduced the technology open-endedly, saying, “The little guys up there on the screen and the background that they’re in, could literally be anything… Your imagination is really the limit.” They clarified that their goal was to solicit advice from the students, asking “how we should think about the system, like what it’s good for.” Inviting students to envision what genres of activity the technology could support positioned them with authority to pursue their own goals and center their ways of being and knowing.
In moments where researcher-facilitators voiced concerns about the ambitiousness of groups’ projects, students exhibited epistemic agency in arguing to pursue their visions. For instance, a researcher expressed concern about the long list of factors students brainstormed to include in their activity. Though one student echoed this concern, the group as a whole leaned into the problem, exploring ways to combine ideas until they reached a satisfactory resolution. Another researcher channeled her anxiety that her group was pursuing a too ambitious conception of mixed reality into supporting them to realize their vision of games embedded in a larger narrative. This produced richly divergent activities (Brady et al., 2022) that centered narrative, gaming, and perspective-taking in unique ways to motivate environmentalism.
Reflecting on the project, students highlighted how rewarding it was to grapple with uncertainty and diverse ideas, working collaboratively to design activities they were proud of. One student wrote, “It made me feel like I was doing something important towards a better future.” Environmental issues are often taught didactically, undermining youth agency. This is especially problematic given that youth feel they are expected to solve the environmental issues their generation is inheriting (Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2020). We must strive for epistemic agency to empower youth to effect change.

Authors

• Tessaly Jen, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author

• Efrat Ayalon, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author

• Lauren Vogelstein, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Felix Choussat, Vanderbilt University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Corey Brady, Southern Methodist University
  Non-Presenting Author