Teacher Noticing for Supporting Students’ Epistemic Agency in Science Sensemaking Discussions

ABSTRACT

Calls to immerse students in the sensemaking practices of science recommend that students propose ideas and work together to construct explanations as well as drive the evaluation and decision-making around classroom knowledge-building. In other words, they should be participating with epistemic agency. Part of the teaching work of supporting student sensemaking, therefore, is to intentionally open up space for student contributions and negotiations during sensemaking. The type of space that is opened up for students’ sensemaking is highly dependent on teachers’ choices and interpretations of student contributions. Accordingly, this paper leverages a teacher noticing framework to begin to characterize the teacher noticing and decision-making involved in supporting students’ epistemic agency while teaching. Using a novel point-of-view video collection methodology, we asked two teachers to identify moments while teaching in which they were making a decision about how to open up or close down space for students’ epistemic agency. We found that both teachers attended similarly to the disciplinary substance of students’ ideas; the epistemic nature of students’ ideas; students’ epistemic stance or orientation during participation; and students’ overall degree of engagement. Teachers’ responses to students varied across pedagogical phenomena, and they also varied in their effectiveness. These variations were related to each teacher’s conception of epistemic agency. We propose that attention to the epistemic nature of students’ responses and to students’ epistemic stance or orientation may be especially important foci of teacher attention for supporting students’ epistemic agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic agency
• sensemaking
• teacher noticing

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the PAGES project and Impact on Science Education for providing the context for participant recruitment for this study. We would also like to thank Gabe Ehrlich, Jackie Chis, and Muxin Zhang for their support in collecting and processing data; and Barbara Hug, Elizabeth Dyer, and Kevin Hall for their feedback on analysis and findings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ We recognize that these are very different kinds of stakes with very different implications for the work that follows; we do not mean to conflate them along those lines. We simply aim to highlight that both kinds of “stakes” can serve as genuine motivators for the sensemaking work.

² We chose to collapse these categories but maintain the headings because they tended to be responses that only varied by pedagogical phenomena (e.g., redirecting in response to ideas, resetting in response to participation), yet were helpful to distinguish in describing the coding.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Illinois Campus Research Board under Grant No. RB18139; and the Hardie Faculty Fellows program. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funders.