Shared Epistemic Agency: An Empirical Study of an Emergent Construct

Abstract

This article reports on a qualitative study of the construct of shared epistemic agency, investigated in the context of collaborative instructional design activities of university students. The aim of the study is to shed light on the notion of shared epistemic agency and to create empirical grounding for its theoretical description. The current study provides an account of the construct, based on a review of several theoretical conceptualizations and on the analysis of empirical material from 2 case studies from university education. We investigate shared epistemic agency within the specific framework of the knowledge creation perspective on learning, viewing it as the capacity that enables deliberate collaborative efforts of groups to create shared knowledge objects. Our study identifies and describes 2 core dimensions of shared epistemic agency: the epistemic and the regulative dimensions. We identify actions within each dimension that indicate the manifestation of shared epistemic agency in the practice of collaborative creation of shared knowledge objects. This study also distinguishes patterns of action that provide indications of how shared epistemic agency is differently articulated in the 2 groups' collaborative object-oriented activities.

Notes

¹We use the term regulative in its broader sense, referring to the management of collaborative process.

²This group joined the research project 2 weeks after the start of the course. Therefore, fewer data were collected from this group.

³The two groups are referred to throughout as Group A (Learning module group) and Group B (Evaluation training group).

⁴For confidentiality reasons, the client institutions are referred to throughout as Client A and Client B.

⁵The excerpts shown are translations of the original dialogues. These excerpts are for illustrative purposes only; not all episodes of data showing shared epistemic agency are presented in this report.

⁶(line …): Indication in the article text of the position of the discussed utterances in the transcript.