Student Acquisition of Epistemic Practices in Their Argumentative Writing in Urban Biology Modeling Classroom

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 9:00 am
  In Roundtable Session: Writing Practices That Change Writers Across Ages and Spaces (Table 19)

Abstract

A highly regarded biology teacher positioned students with epistemic agency, using modeling instruction, which led to her students’ acquisition of epistemic practices in argumentative writing. Participants included an experienced teacher and a student teacher using modeling instruction and 23 “accelerated” biology students in an urban high school. Teacher solidarity lens (Philip et al., 2016) and social construction (Gergen, 2015) frame a telling case (Mitchell, 1984) with a close examination of a student’s writing over time. The teacher taught the process of how to think about data from simple observation to warranting evidence in support of a scientific claim and shift from a description and comparison writing about graphs to an interpretation of their meaning with application of ecology concepts.

Author

• Katherine Michelle St. Clair Misar, SUNY - College at New Paltz