Developing secondary students’ epistemic agency in a knowledge-building community

Abstract

A key educational objective for the twenty-first century is developing students’ epistemic agency. Epistemic agency is the active process of choosing when, what, where one learns and how one knows, as well as the capacity to create knowledge in a community. The knowledge-building communities model developed by Scardamalia and Bereiter was used in a New Zealand Year 13 distance art history class to support the development of students’ epistemic agency in 2013. In this study, students were given more control in the learning process, and were able to exercise epistemic agency through identifying their knowledge gaps, sharing information and ideas, developing ideas and creating communal knowledge. A number of factors that increased students’ development of epistemic agency are also discussed in this article.

Keywords:

• Epistemic agency
• knowledge building
• Knowledge Forum

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the students who participated in this project. The support provided by Ken Pullar, Ann Trewern, Fiona Stuart, Associate Professor Alison Gilmore and Dr Lee Smith in the research and review process is gratefully acknowledged.