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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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EPISTEMIC REKEYING: EPISTEMIC TENSIONS ACROSS DISCIPLINES AS OPPORTUNITIES FOR ARTISTIC RESPONSE
There are strong motivations to implement integrated STEAM activities that engage with key ideas in mathematics. In integrating mathematics with other STEM disciplines, however, epistemic tensions can emerge. Rather than attempting to suppress, avoid, or adjudicate these tensions, we propose a strategy of “epistemic rekeying,” in which epistemic tensions are offered as provocations for students to create playful and artistic responses. This approach takes epistemic tensions seriously and makes them accessible to young learners. We give the rationale for this approach and describe settings where students’ creativity suggested its potential to us.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2149356
- PAR ID:
- 10575481
- Editor(s):
- Lamberg, T; Moss, D
- Publisher / Repository:
- Lamberg, T., & Moss, D. (2023). Proceedings of the forty-fifth annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (Vol. 2). University of Nevada, Reno.
- Date Published:
- ISSN:
- 978-1-7348057-2-7
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Integrated STEM / STEAM, Mathematical Representations, Computational Thinking, Classroom Discourse
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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