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Studies in science and mathematics education have shown that teachers’ responsiveness to students’ ideas, feelings, and experiences is critical for promoting epistemic agency, disciplinary engagement, and equity. Such responsiveness is particularly important for students whose cultures, backgrounds, and funds of knowledge have been traditionally marginalized in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classrooms. Yet, what allows teachers to enact responsive teaching is less clear. We argue that epistemic empathy—the capacity for tuning into and appreciating learners’ intellectual and emotional experiences in constructing, communicating, and critiquing knowledge—is an essential driver of teacher responsiveness. In this work, we examine how epistemic empathy can serve to support teachers’ attention and responsiveness to students’ sensemaking experiences in the classroom and discuss emergent tensions that arise in this work. We end with implications for research and for teacher education to cultivate epistemic empathy as a resource for responsive teaching and a target for teacher learning.
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“Well that's how the kids feel!”—Epistemic empathy as a driver of responsive teaching
Abstract While research shows that responsive teaching fosters students' disciplinary learning and equitable opportunities for participation, there is yet much to know about how teachers come to be responsive to their students' experiences in the science classroom. In this work, we set out to examine whether and how engaging teachersas learnersin doing science may support responsive instructional practices. We draw on data from a year‐long blended‐online science professional development (PD) program that began with an emphasis on teachers' doing science and progressed to supporting their attention to their students' doing science. By analyzing videos from teachers' classrooms collected throughout the PD, we found that teachers became more stable in attending and responding to their students' thinking. In this article, we present evidence from teachers' reflections that this stability was supported by the teachers' intellectual and emotional experiences as learners. Specifically, we argue that engaging in extended scientific inquiry provided a basis for the teachers havingepistemic empathyfor their students—their tuning into and appreciating their students'intellectualandemotionalexperiences in science, which in turn supported teachers' responsiveness in the classroom.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1844453
- PAR ID:
- 10361226
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Research in Science Teaching
- Volume:
- 59
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0022-4308
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 223-251
- Size(s):
- p. 223-251
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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