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1. “I’m going to feel like a failure” – How group dynamics influence one Black girl’s agency

   Schellinger, J.; Jaber, L. Z.; Southerland, S. (January 2023, American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting)

   Science learning is thought to be best supported when students are positioned as epistemic agents. Using a case study approach, we explore the experiences of one Black middle school girl and her epistemic efforts and the ways in which her group members’ responses to her efforts either supported or constrained her epistemic agency during small group work in two argumentation lessons. Our findings show that Jessie’s epistemic efforts were not often taken up by her peers in ways that support her epistemic agency, findings that have implications for student learning and engagement in terms of the epistemic work we ask students to engage in, and the instructional strategies that support this work. 

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2. Examining Rights to Participate and Struggles to Belong in Science Classrooms through a Black Girl’s Engagement in Argumentation

   Schellinger, J.; Jaber, L. Z.; Southerland, S. (January 2023, Annual meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences)

   If we are to support students to become epistemic agents in the ways envisioned in reforms, we must acknowledge that classrooms can be spaces of injustice, where instructional efforts can propagate inequitable systems of oppression. In this case study, we describe the epistemic efforts of one Black girl, Jessie, and the rights and privileges afforded or denied to her as she worked with a group of her peers to develop and negotiate a scientific claim. Through examination of video data, transcripts, and student work products, we characterized students’ efforts as about epistemic, rhetorical, and pseudo-argumentation, and how we explored how such efforts invited or constrained Jessie’s epistemic agency. Jessie’s pattern of persistence, which we understand to be her fight to have her rights as a scientific sensemaker acknowledged, surfaced issues of inequity in which Jessie’s ongoing efforts to engage in epistemic argumentation were rejected by her peers. 

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3. Designing and enacting lessons to promote students’ epistemic agency in middle school biology classrooms

   Akçil-Okan, Ö.; Tekkumru-Kisa, M.; Southerland, S. A. (January 2023, Annual Meeting of the National Association of Research in Science Teaching)

   Reform-based instruction that fosters all students’ intellectual engagement and sensemaking is possible. However, it is not yet prevalent across many science classrooms. To gain more insight into how to design and enact science instruction supporting students’ intellectual engagement, this investigation centered on understanding how to design and implement science lessons for promoting students’ intellectual engagement as epistemic agents who shape knowledge building happening in the classroom. We examined a middle school science teacher's design and implementation of four lessons that she did as part of a PD focused on fostering productive science talk in science classrooms. Our analysis revealed that her efforts in fostering opportunities for students’ epistemic agency were evident in both her lesson design and implementation. Her responsiveness to students’ thinking/intellectual engagement throughout the lesson implementations via principled improvisations supported opportunities for students’ epistemic agency. Her efforts allow us to understand how the design and implementation of science lessons with the focus of opening space and maintaining this space by being responsive to students’ thinking are critical for fostering students’ epistemic agency. These findings can provide implications for professional development efforts that seek to develop teachers’ capacity for reform-based instruction in science classrooms. 

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4. Attention to student emotions and teacher vulnerability as tools to maintain student disciplinary engagement

   Schellinger, J.; Jaber, L. Z.; Southerland, S. A. (January 2023, National Association for Research in Science Teaching Annual Meeting 2023)

   Research on students’ engagement suggests that epistemic affect--that is, the feelings and emotions experienced in the epistemic work of making sense of phenomena-- should be recognized as a central component of meaningful disciplinary engagement in science. These feelings and emotions are not tangential by-products, but are essential components of disciplinary engagement. Yet, there is still much to understand about how educators can attend and respond to students’ emotions in ways that support disciplinary engagement in science. To inform these efforts, we follow one high school Biology teacher, Amelia, to answer the following question: How does Amelia attend to and support her students’ emotions in ways that support their disciplinary engagement? Data examined include teacher interviews and classroom recordings of two multi-day science lessons. We found that the teacher worked to support her students’ emotions in moments of uncertainty in at least two ways: (1) by attending to these emotions directly, and (2) by sharing her personal experiences and feelings in engaging in similar activities as a science learner. We describe how Amelia made herself vulnerable to students, describing her own struggles in making sense of phenomena, in turn supporting her students to normalize these experiences as part of doing science. 

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5. Complex Dynamics of Epistemic Agency in a College Physics Lab Course

   Ian Descamps; Sophia Jeon; Rachel Scherr; Natasha Holmes; David Hammer (June 2023, Computersupported collaborative learning)

   Blikstein, P; Van Aalst, J; Kizito, R; Brennan, K (Ed.)

   We study students in a college physics lab course encountering a designed-for discrepancy between their data and the relevant physical model. We examine the moment-by- moment dynamics of the groups’ efforts at problematizing and sensemaking, with a specific focus on epistemic agency. Drawing from prior studies of agency – as it relates to learning (Damşa et al., 2010), inquiry (Keifert et al., 2018), and scientific practice (Pickering 1995) – we study the complex ways in which epistemic agency manifests (and doesn’t) in the students’ work. Our analysis suggests several influences on the students’ agency, including features of the social and material context as well as how the students frame what it is they are doing (Hammer et al., 2005), in the lab as a whole and in moments within it. The findings suggest implications and questions with respect to designing labs to support disciplinary practices. 

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