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.
LINGUISTIC TENSIONS IN GENERALIZING A MATHEMATICS EDUCATION FRAMEWORK FOR STEM EDUCATION
Research processes are often messy and include tensions that are unnamed in the final products. In our attempt to update and generalize a framework used to examine teachers’ support for collective argumentation in mathematics education classrooms to examining teachers’ work in interdisciplinary STEM contexts, we have experienced significant linguistic tensions because of the context-dependent nature of language. We aim to acknowledge the difficulty of generalizing research beyond the mathematics education community, describe our attempts to resolve the problem we face, and discuss potential conclusions pertaining to the feasibility of generalizing frameworks beyond mathematics education.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1741910
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10472240
- Editor(s):
- Lischka, A. E.; Dyer, E. B.; Jones, R. S.; Lovett, J.; Strayer, J.; Drown, S
- Publisher / Repository:
- PME-NA/Middle Tennessee State University
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education: Critical Dissonance and Resonant Harmony
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Nashville, TN
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Proceeding:
- https://doi.org/10.51272/pmena.44.2022
