Elementary Students’ Production and Use of Epistemic Diversity in the Context of Disciplinary Science Engagement (Poster 5)

• In Event: Connective and Productive Disciplinary Engagement: Key Concepts, Applications, Developments, and New Directions

Abstract

Objectives
Elementary students are always learning more than science ideas and practices; they are learning how to reproduce or resist the implicit social and cultural practices that are endemic to engagement in the discipline. Through attending to power as part of engagement, science classrooms can be spaces for students to create equitable science culture for learning. “How can we analyze and interpret students’ disciplinary engagement in science as integrated with the scientific understanding of content and epistemic diversity?”

Theoretical framework
Agarwal & Sengupta-Irving, 2019 to attend to power as an integral aspect of all learning in communities (Holland & Lave, 2001), bringing together critical and social cultural theories. The CPDE Framework can be used to understand and shed light on processes that students engage in to make sense of the forces that create normative or multiple frameworks for what counts as science knowledge. Blending social cultural theory with critical perspective students interrogate power in the mediation of the cultural tools (language, symbols, artifacts) and in interactions of project-based learning (PBL). Epistemic diversity refers to contrasting systems of discourse and etiquette norms, and experiential knowledge related to dignity and survival.

Methods
This study is situated in the S-PBL project, in the 3rd grade unit, “How can I help the birds in my community grow up and thrive?” To highlight social processes, in classroom observation, we focused on student-to-student interactions. We used grounded, thematic analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) to look for teachers’ and students’ navigation of tensions around culture, knowing and social justice in their sense making. Interviews were coded with a priori (e.g., PBL features) and grounded codes (e.g., disciplinary knowledge, community-based and discursive knowledge; tensions around participation).

Data sources
Multi-sourced dataset includes teacher observation of 3 elementary teachers enacting PBL science curriculum. (Video includes 2 45-minute periods 2X a week for 6 weeks per teacher N=36).

Results
We highlight and explore 4 critical and contrasting cases of Connective and Productive Disciplinary Engagement in Science. We underscore what can be observed in student interactions with science in problem spaces. Students discuss how features of birds are inherited and offer more or less chance of survival in a changing environment (problematizing); they are sensemaking about (value of epistemic diversity) whose viewpoint “matters” when contrasting the value placed on threatened bird survival with dignity of people in poverty.

Significance
The CPDE framework makes visible students’ learning about power and culture as part of engagement in science learning and is useful as an analytic and design tool. We need to know more about how to make apparent elementary students’ learning of science and how to negotiate novel meanings of power that challenge discourse norms, (i.e., scripted, overly polite) and value epistemic diversity.

Authors

• Emily Adah Miller, University of Georgia

• Tingting Li, Washington State University