Recognized and Realigned: A Veteran Teacher's Moves to Leverage Familiar Forms of Epistemic Agency While Using Next Generation Science Standard Inspired Materials

ABSTRACT

For 3 days, Amy, a veteran middle school science teacher, struggled to engage students in using Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)‐aligned curriculum designed to facilitate scientific argumentation. Amy consistently used productive framing bids or cues to redirect students from “doing school” toward sensemaking and “doing science.” Teachers may use framing bids to curate opportunities for students' epistemic agency as they shape and contribute to knowledge construction and knowledge practices of the classroom community (Damşa et al. 2010; Stroup, 2014; Miller et al. 2018). Although these types of framing bids generally “worked” in Amy's class—initiating or helping to sustain their engagement in sensemaking—they were largely unsuccessful in these lessons. We argue that, on Days 1‐3, this difficulty arose from a key mismatch: the forms of epistemic agency (students’ opportunity to evaluate and contribute to knowledge construction) invited by the curriculum differed significantly from the forms students typically enacted in her classroom. On day 4, Amy made minor adjustments to the lesson, some of which added structure. Amy restored students' ability to be “experts,” to choose sources of information, and allowed the use of familiar digital tools. These adjustments resulted in dramatic shifts in students' reactions to the curriculum: as the curriculum intended, students engaged in scientific argumentation and evaluations of model‐evidence (mis)match. By realigning the forms of epistemic agency invited by the lesson to those with which students were familiar, Amy facilitated sustained sensemaking through engagement with science practices, as intended by the curriculum. Through a single case study, we argue that the multidimensionality of epistemic agency–the multiple forms it can take– matters to students and can be recognized by teachers. Therefore, when preparing teachers to implement NGSS‐aligned curricular units, teacher educators should draw upon teachers' knowledge of their students and classroom to identify, interpret and adapt curricula in ways that attend to potential (mis)matches between the forms of epistemic agency invited by the curriculum and the forms of epistemic agency students typically enact and value in the teacher's classroom.