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Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education

Authors:
Lina Markauskaite at The University of Sydney
Lina Markauskaite
Peter Goodyear at The University of Sydney
Peter Goodyear
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Abstract

This book, by combining sociocultural, material, cognitive and embodied perspectives on human knowing, offers a new and powerful conceptualisation of epistemic fluency – a capacity that underpins knowledgeable professional action and innovation. Using results from empirical studies of professional education programs, the book sheds light on practical ways in which the development of epistemic fluency can be recognised and supported - in higher education and in the transition to work. The book provides a broader and deeper conception of epistemic fluency than previously available in the literature. Epistemic fluency involves a set of capabilities that allow people to recognize and participate in different ways of knowing. Such people are adept at combining different kinds of specialised and context-dependent knowledge and at reconfiguring their work environment to see problems and solutions anew. In practical terms, the book addresses the following kinds of questions. What does it take to be a productive member of a multidisciplinary team working on a complex problem? What enables a person to integrate different types and fields of knowledge, indeed different ways of knowing, in order to make some well-founded decisions and take actions in the world? What personal knowledge resources are entailed in analysing a problem and describing an innovative solution, such that the innovation can be shared in an organization or professional community? How do people get better at these things; and how can teachers in higher education help students develop these valued capacities? The answers to these questions are central to a thorough understanding of what it means to become an effective knowledge worker and resourceful professional.
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Epistemic fluency and professional education
innovation, knowledgeable action and
actionable knowledge
Lina Markauskaite and Peter Goodyear
The University of Sydney
2015
Cite as: Markauskaite, L., & Goodyear, P. (forthcoming, 2015). Epistemic fluency and
professional education: Innovation, knowledgeable action and working knowledge.
Dordrecht: Springer.
Manuscript submitted for Springer 3 August 2015.
Table of contents
1 Introduction
1.1 The social importance of professional education
1.2 Patterns in professional work – introducing epistemic forms and games
1.3 Seeing through the changing surface of professional work and knowledge
1.4 Research on education, learning and expertise: from shifts in fashion to an
integrated account
1.5 Our empirical research
1.6 Overview of the book: key ideas
1.7 Reading the book: online glossary
2 Professional work in contemporary contexts
2.1 Professions and professional work
2.2 Demands of contemporary professional work
2.3 Preparation for the professions in higher education
2.4 Approaches within professional education
2.5 Concluding points
3 Defining the problem: four epistemic projects in professional work and education
3.1 Crafting expert practitioners
3.2 The reflective-rational project: From rational knowledge to reflective practice to
rational reflection
3.3 The reflective-embodied project: Skill and the ontological turn in practice
3.4 Representational and performative accounts, and the need to cross boundaries
3.5 The knowledge building project: From practice as knowledge transfer to knowing as
epistemic practice
3.6 The relational project: From individualistic to relational expertise
3.7 Combining the four epistemic projects: Knowledge for doing and knowledge for
innovation and learning
4 The shapes taken by personal professional knowledge
4.1 What knowledge is
4.2 Public, personal and organisational knowledge
4.3 Doing and understanding
4.4 Knowledge and knowing
4.5 Tacit knowledge and explicit learning
4.6 Actionable knowledge
5 Professional knowledge and knowing in shared epistemic spaces: the person-plus
perspective
5.1 Relational expertise and inter-professional work
5.2 (Re-)presenting knowledge and shared epistemic labour
5.3 Continuity of practice and innovation: knowing with and through objects
5.4 Linking epistemic practice with knowledge culture
5.5 Knowledge space and epistemic assemblage 131
5.6 Creating assemblages for local knowledge work
5.7 Knowledge and knowing in shared epistemic spaces
6 Understanding the mind
6.1 Understanding the human mind and learning: experience, brain, environment and
culture
6.2 From cognition as structure to cognition as coordination and enaction
6.3 Learning and conceptual change: Formal concepts and experiential knowledge
6.4 Troublesome knowledge and threshold concepts
6.5 Grounding conceptual knowledge in experience: situated concepts
6.6 Conceptual understanding and actionable knowledge
6.7 Transfer
6.8 Dynamic expertise, transfer and innovation
7 Epistemic thinking
7.1 Knowledge and knowing as an open system
7.2 Personal epistemology, epistemic thinking and epistemic resources
7.3 Personal epistemology: classical accounts
7.4 Personal epistemology research: critique and new directions
7.5 The division of cognitive labour: epistemological implications
7.6 The changing scope of epistemic cognition
7.7 The epistemic resources view
7.8 Epistemic affordances
7.9 Cognitive and epistemic flexibility
8 Objects, things and artefacts in professional learning and doing
8.1 Assessment tasks in professional education
8.2 Knowing through objects: Objectual practices in learning and work
8.3 Motives, objects and things
8.4 Finding objects for professional education and reifying them in material artefacts
8.5 A case: Assembling objects and things in an epistemic artefact
8.6 Perception, skill and artefact
8.7 Understanding tasks and artefacts
8.8 Knowledge work and conceptual artefacts from the perspective of professional
practice
9 Epistemic tools and artefacts in epistemic practices and systems
9.1 Epistemic practice
9.2 Epistemic tools
9.3 Action, meaning and (epistemic) practice
9.4 Understanding epistemic qualities of artefacts: results from artefact analysis
9.5 Epistemic openness: knowledge practice systems
10 Inscribing professional knowledge and knowing
10.1 Inscriptions in professional work and learning
10.2 Functional properties of knowledge inscriptions
10.3 Skill for seeing, inscribing and knowing the world
10.4 Becoming a school counsellor through inscribing students’ behaviour
10.5 Skill for seeing, inscribing and knowing work
10.6 Analysis of students’ inscriptions of knowledge and work
10.7 Some insights into the functional (pedagogical) properties of learning inscriptions
10.8 From inscribing to re-presenting: personal, system and enactive views of inscriptions
11 Inscriptions shaping mind, meaning and action
11.1 How meanings get expressed and inscribed in knowledge production
11.2 How meanings get expressed and inscribed in professional learning
11.3 Unpacking the semiotic nature of professional knowledge work
11.4 What ways of knowing and slices of knowledge get inscribed?
11.5 Conceptual integration and material blending
11.6 An Example: Blending, projecting and enacting through inscribing a lesson
11.7 Creating actionable epistemic spaces through grounding and blending
12 Epistemic tools, instruments and infrastructure in professional knowledge work and
learning
12.1 Epistemic tools, infrastructures and practices
12.2 Instrumental genesis: linking tool and game
12.3 Epistemic tools and infrastructures for professional work
12.4 An example: Epistemic infrastructure for child behavioural assessment
13 Taxonomies of epistemic tools and infrastructures
13.1 A taxonomy of epistemic tools
13.2 A taxonomy of epistemic infrastructure
13.3 Learning as inhabiting an epistemic infrastructure
14 Professional epistemic games
14.1 Introducing the idea of epistemic games
14.2 Illustrating the idea of epistemic games in professional practice: an example from
pharmacy
14.3 Creating a taxonomy of epistemic games: approach and rationale
14.4 The taxonomy of epistemic games
15 Weaving ways of knowing
15.1 Medication Management Review as “Signature pedagogy”
15.2 Social infrastructure
15.3 Epistemic infrastructure
15.4 Assembling and weaving
15.5 The medication review form as a modelling site
15.6 Linking conceptual and material with social: weaving epistemic games with social
(bureaucratic) infrastructure
15.7 Concluding points
16 Rethinking the material, the embodied and the social for professional education
16.1 Epistemic games in course designs: some empirical illustrations
16.2 Actionable knowing as embodied social practices in the material world
16.3 How matter matters in professional knowledge work
16.4 Learning and thinking with social others
16.5 Four kinds of mediation: tools, social others, artefacts and self
16.6 Concluding points: learning in “thin” and “thick” social and material environments
17 Conceptual resourcefulness and actionable concepts: concepts revisited
17.1 Concepts revisited
17.2 Some examples: ‘Constructivism’ and other concepts in abstract notions, contexts
and actions
17.3 Concepts in mind and in discourse
17.4 Abstract, contextual and situated concepts
17.5 Actionable concepts
17.6 A case: constructing actionable concepts
17.7 Actionable concepts as concepts that mean and matter
18 Epistemic resourcefulness for actionable knowing
18.1 Understanding epistemic resources
18.2 Epistemic resources in discourse and the mind
18.3 Actionable epistemic resources
18.4 Linking epistemic and conceptual: dynamic view of conceptual learning
18.5 Framing, stability and coherence
18.6 Learning to coordinate diverse ways of knowing
19 Teaching and learning for epistemic fluency
19.1 Introduction
19.2 Approach One: Learning by knowledge integration
19.3 Approach Two: Learning by playing epistemic games
19.4 Approach Three: Learning by designing knowledge
19.5 Approach Four: Learning by designing inquiry
19.6 Concluding comments
20 Creating epistemic environments: learning, teaching and design
20.1 From rational thought to embodied skill to grounded actionable knowledge
20.2 What is knowledge, revisited: dynamic knowledge, grounded concepts and
embodied epistemic environments
20.3 Learning by creating an epistemic environment and constructing a conscientious self
20.4 Designing for epistemic fluency

Chapters (20)

Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
Article
  • Sep 2017
People who can act knowledgably, who are flexible and adept in their use of different kinds of knowledge and who can shape their environment to generate new insights are demonstrating a capacity which we call ‘epistemic fluency’. This chapter argues that epistemic fluency plays an important, though underappreciated, role in professional life. To understand how knowledge works in routine and innovative professional activities, one needs to look beneath the surface appearance of behaviours and language and find generative patterns – such as epistemic forms and games. This chapter provides an overview of the core conceptual concerns of the book, tracing their development across the 19 chapters that follow. It also provides a summary of the body of empirical research on which we draw when illustrating our arguments.
Professional Work in Contemporary Contexts
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.19-45
A primary function for this chapter is to build a number of bridges between contemporary writing about the nature of professional work and professional education, on the one hand, and the theoretical exploration that we are providing in the body of the book. It summarises ideas that will be familiar to those who research the professions and to those who are deeply engaged in programs of professional education. It builds on these ideas by offering a preliminary description of the changing nature of professional work ? emphasising the roles played by knowledge and the importance of being able to work flexibly and creatively with knowledge. The chapter also uses a brief summary of a number of common approaches to professional education to start an analysis of the relations between codified and other forms of knowledge in professional work and learning.
Defining the Problem: Four Epistemic Projects in Professional Work and Education
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.47-69
In this chapter, we show how preparation for professional work entails four distinguishable kinds of epistemic challenges ? each addressed in terms of a characteristic epistemic project. We organise the analysis using two fundamental distinctions. The first of these is a distinction between representational and performative views on professional action and professional learning. Representational views foreground articulated knowledge and its (sometimes problematic) connections to professional action. Performative views foreground the tight relations between knowing, being and acting in the world. The second distinction concerns working across professional boundaries ? the ?spatial? boundaries that mark of one profession from another or professionals from their clients and the ?temporal? boundaries where established and innovative practices mingle. We also make a crucial distinction in this chapter between knowledge work and epistemic work and between using existing knowledge to get work done and working in ways that create new knowledge.
The Shapes Taken by Personal Professional Knowledge
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.71-101
This chapters and Chap. 5 provide complementary accounts of knowledge. This chapter is a primer on knowledge. It focusses on the individual professional person ? on personal professional knowledge. We show why it is useful to distinguish between different kinds of knowledge ? public, organisational and personal, codified and non-codified, tacit and explicit ? and we develop our argument about relations between knowledgeable action and actionable knowledge: the kinds of knowledge that help get things done in practical situations.
Professional Knowledge and Knowing in Shared Epistemic Spaces: The Person-Plus Perspective
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.103-125
This chapter extends the arguments developed in Chap. 4 by concentrating on the kinds of knowledge that are needed when people work together. The frame of reference shifts from what an individual might be said to know, to how knowledge functions when professional work is a collective accomplishment. We explore some of the ways that knowledge and knowledgeable action are distributed across systems or networks of people and objects ? to constitute shared epistemic spaces. While our focus is on shared professional knowledge practices, we argue that in order to understand professional learning for knowledgeable action and innovation, traditional views of practice ? as shared cultural, social and material phenomena ? need to be extended at least one level downwards: to include human skills and the mind.
Understanding the Mind
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.127-166
In this chapter we contend that research in and for education has suffered from a tendency to emphasise one aspect of human capability at the expense of others. For example, some research traditions give a central place to human cognition and marginalise the social; other bodies of research focus on the brain, while marginalising human experience. This chapter uses some recent ideas on grounded cognition to show how it is possible, and necessary, to connect mind, brain, body, culture and environment in providing satisfactory explanations of how people get things done. This also gives us a better way of talking about relations between the kinds of codified knowledge encountered in formal instruction and the experiential knowledge people develop in the rest of life. We argue that a better understanding of relations between codified and experiential knowledge helps resolve some problems involved in conceptual change and in understanding the status of threshold concepts.
Epistemic Thinking
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.167-194
This chapter builds upon an important distinction made in Chap. 3: between using knowledge and improving knowledge. We look at how epistemic resources extend human conceptual system ? that is, how the human mind gains an ability to create new knowledge, or, in other words, what kind of conceptual system could underpin human epistemic agency. We use a body of existing literature on personal epistemologies, including research on what people believe about the nature of knowledge, how new knowledge is created and how one distinguishes between reliable and unreliable knowledge. But our interest in this research is somewhat different from that evinced by its protagonists. We are not that interested in developmental changes and variations in what people believe about knowledge. Rather, we want to know what is involved when people develop a capacity to use epistemic resources. We also draw once more on grounded cognition, to position epistemic agency in relation to the environment in which epistemic activity is unfolding. This means we use the idea of epistemic affordances ? what the environment offers by way of epistemic possibilities ? to refine an account of the skills needed to take up what is on offer.
Objects, Things and Artefacts in Professional Learning and Doing
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.195-231
This is the first major chapter in the book in which we combine outcomes from our empirical research with further development of the main lines of the theoretical argument. In this chapter, we use some of the assessment tasks set for students who are going on work placement (internship or practicum). We argue that when students are tackling an assessment task, they are inevitably engaging in an artefact-oriented activity. We unpick the nature of this activity ? distinguishing between object as motive and object as material entity. We make this distinction, in part, to then look at connections between motive and materiality in the overlapping worlds of the classroom and the workplace. We show that learning for knowledgeable action often takes the shape of an epistemic artefact-oriented activity. This activity connects, rather than separates, abstract knowledge and objects of professional practice with embodied skill through concrete, materially expressed, actions and things. We also distinguish between different kinds of artefacts ? showing the ways in which they preserve, transfer and improve upon skills used in the professional workplace.
Epistemic Tools and Artefacts in Epistemic Practices and Systems
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.233-264
This chapter extends Chap. 8 by following tools and other artefacts into their broader contexts of use. This helps understand how they function in professional work and learning in the larger systems of professional practice. An important feature of this chapter is that we draw upon the different but interwoven epistemic cultures of learning, research and the professions: cultures which come together in the hybrid spaces of the university. We show that epistemic artefacts, produced by students as a part of professional learning, often have multiple functions and, most importantly, that they combine different epistemic qualities. We illustrate these qualities and argue that they provide important bridges between ?learning to do? and ?learning to understand? ? thereby underpinning epistemic fluency.
Inscribing Professional Knowledge and Knowing
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.265-302
This chapter is the first of a pair of chapters concerned with the role of inscriptions and inscriptional practices in professional work and professional education. We use the term ?inscription? to cover a wide range of representations that are produced in media (external to the mind). Inscriptions play a vital role in knowledgeable work and innovation, so understanding the nature of professional inscriptions, and how students learn the capacities for inscribing, is critical. In this chapter, we analyse the activity of someone who is learning to be a school counsellor, tracing the inscriptional practices involved in completing one of their core tasks. We distinguish between three types of inscription: projective (inscriptions for practice), productive (inscriptions in practice) and illuminative (inscriptions of practice). Building on this ground, we introduce an enactive view of inscriptions and argue that students should be helped to see how ? through inscriptional activity ? they can both extend their own learning and knowing and improve the systems in which they are working. These ideas are particularly useful to professional educators who are aiming for a better alignment between educational goals and inscriptional tasks that are set for students. Achieving a better alignment is greatly helped by understanding how inscriptions vary, how they function and what roles they play in knowledgeable action.
Inscriptions Shaping Mind, Meaning and Action
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.303-339
Chapter 11 continues the theme of inscriptional work, begun in Chap. 10. We shift from a functional to a semiotic perspective. That is, we look at how inscriptions bring forth meanings within knowledgeable action in professional learning and work. Using empirical material from our work with nurse educators and teacher educators, we focus on the kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing that get inscribed. We also argue that traditional semiotic accounts do not provide much assistance in understanding the role of inscriptions in the creation of new ideas, particularly those ideas that combine knowledge from multiple disciplines and domains of human activity. We use this to develop connections with the literature on conceptual integration and material blending, to examine more closely how innovation and the generation of new ideas depend upon skilful interweaving of complex cognitive work in the mind with actions in the world. We argue that inscriptions often provide an essential material?symbolic anchor for this complex generative work, which is distributed across body, mind and world.
Epistemic Tools, Instruments and Infrastructure in Professional Knowledge Work and Learning
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.341-366
In this chapter, our attention shifts from inscriptions and epistemic artefacts to the sets of tools and infrastructures in which such artefacts are produced. In particular, we use ideas about instrumental genesis to examine ways in which the qualities of tools and other artefacts combine with schemes for their use. We describe professional epistemic infrastructures as the basic material, symbolic and organisational structures that underpin various knowledge practices. The chapter reviews the status and functioning of tools in epistemic work and forges connections with schemes for their use ? culturally shared but individually customised epistemic games. A key theme in this chapter concerns the dynamism of epistemic work ? our analyses of passages of professional activity reveal rapid shifts back and forth between different assemblages of tools and different forms of knowledge and ways of knowing. Different intrinsic and extrinsic properties of the tools that constitute professional epistemic infrastructure have strong implications of how professional work is done and how knowledge and skills for such work can be taught and learnt.
Taxonomies of Epistemic Tools and Infrastructures
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.367-393
Chapters 13 and 14 are taxonomic. Chapter 13 maps a landscape of epistemic tools and infrastructures, identifying the main kinds of tools and infrastructures and describing some of their interrelationships. This taxonomic work does not spring from an academic desire to tidy up a fuzzy space. Rather, we want to argue that professional workers ? and those who help them prepare for the professions ? can benefit from being able to consciously distinguish between different kinds of epistemic tools and to think and talk about the tasks for which each is best suited.
Professional Epistemic Games
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.395-434
Chapter 14 maps the different varieties of epistemic games to be found in professional work. In general terms, epistemic games are generative patterns of inquiry, and we show how this notion can provide insights into ways of working creatively with knowledge in professional fields, not just in the domains of scientific inquiry in which the term ?epistemic game? originated. Using distinguishing qualities of epistemic games ? such as the sorts of knowledge each produces and the skills needed to play each game ? we identify six main types of professional epistemic games and illustrate how they are played in professional work and learning. But we also note that these games are rarely played just one at a time. They are often woven together into one gradually unfolding situated activity.
Weaving Ways of Knowing
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.435-460
This chapter elaborates on the idea of weaving epistemic games, which we introduced in Chap. 14. The capacities needed to play weaving games are often central to professional expertise, yet learning to play them skilfully can cause significant challenges to novice professionals. Through an extended case study, we show how a process of professional inquiry (in pharmacy) involves weaving together multiple epistemic games. It also depends upon a weaving together of the epistemic games and material and social infrastructures: a skilful linking of conceptual, material and social that must be learnt in the process of becoming an effective, innovative practitioner. We conclude the chapter by arguing that professional education often looks to the established disciplines and scientific fields for an ?epistemic toolbox? that can underpin knowledgeable professional work. This perspective obscures the fact that professions also have their own ?epistemic toolboxes? that they deploy for getting jobs done skilfully and intelligently in practical situations. We argue that professional knowledgeable action requires the capability to take personal ownership of diverse epistemic toolboxes and learn to combine and deploy these tools within the epistemic practices of one?s profession.
Rethinking the Material, the Embodied and the Social for Professional Education
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.461-493
In this chapter, we revisit some key insights into how the social, the material and the embodied enter professional work and learning. We argue that knowledge work and knowledgeable action are constitutively entangled with embodied practices in the material and social worlds. We show how matter matters in professional work, and how a ?socially extended mind? enables thinking with others. This entangling of mind, body and world raises some difficult questions about what is important to teach in the classroom ? and what is reasonable to expect students to learn there ? and what needs to be learned in real workplaces. As a part of our argument, we revisit some well-known ideas about the dialectical, dialogical and trialogical approaches to knowing and learning. We return to the notion of mediation in professional learning and work. We specifically point to the central, yet often obscured, mediating role of self-as-knower, with a resourceful mind and bodily skills, able to act within, and shape, materially and socially rich work environments. Seeing the self as a mediator, coordinator and active constructor of work and learning environments has strong implications for how we should think about professional skilfulness and the professional capacity to learn.
Conceptual Resourcefulness and Actionable Concepts: Concepts Revisited
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.495-522
This chapter and Chap. 18 explore two areas of resourcefulness that are implicated in professional work. In this chapter we focus on conceptual resourcefulness. We start with an important but neglected distinction between concepts in the mind and concepts in discourse. The two are often conflated. Distinguishing between abstract, contextual and situated concepts allows us to clarify the nature of connections between conceptual knowledge and situated action and to argue that actionable concepts play an important role in professional work. We call the ability to make use of appropriate concepts in the flux and flow of demanding professional work conceptual resourcefulness. We show how this functions, through an example drawn from our studies of preservice teachers planning a lesson.
Epistemic Resourcefulness for Actionable Knowing
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.523-552
This chapter mirrors Chap. 17, while shifting the focus to epistemic resourcefulness. We look at how epistemic resources are treated in accounts of the mind and accounts of discourse; both have to be combined in a satisfactory account of epistemic thought and action. We use the case study of preservice teachers? planning to explain the nature of epistemic resources and to introduce the notion of ?framing?. Framing is a way of describing how people make sense of a new situation ? answering the question ?what is going on here?? It helps us to understand what enables people to address the challenges they encounter in work: whether they can respond in innovative and productive, or unproductive, ways. We show that, in solving professional challenges, framing depends upon epistemic resourcefulness ? including an ability to coordinate diverse ways of knowing and acting in the world.
Teaching and Learning for Epistemic Fluency
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.553-594
In this chapter, we turn towards the practicalities of professional education. We use an examination of four broad approaches to education to assess what each can offer to those professional educators who are looking to teach for epistemic fluency. These educational approaches come from a range of sources ? not just from professional education. All these approaches focus on fine-tuning learners? intelligent sensitivity to the critical features of the external environment. However, each of them aims to help learners make distinct connections between different kinds of knowledge and coordinate distinct ways of knowing and acting within the world. Thus, we argue that each has a part to play in completing the jigsaw of education for epistemic fluency. In shorthand terms, the approaches focus on (a) knowledge integration and cognitive flexibility, (b) playing epistemic games, (c) designerly work on knowledge building and (d) learning to design inquiry.
Creating Epistemic Environments: Learning, Teaching and Design
Chapter
  • Sep 2017
  • Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education
  • pp.595-614
This chapter outlines a fifth epistemic project, extending and drawing together the set of four epistemic challenges and projects that we presented in Chap. 3. The chapter centres on the idea of ?grounded actionable knowledge? ? grounding human knowledge and knowing in the physical environment and in an embodied, conscious and conscientious self. Creating and reconfiguring one?s epistemic environment thereby becomes an important accomplishment. We conclude the chapter with some thoughts about educational approaches and designs for learning which can be aligned with this expanded conception of epistemic fluency.
... This appears to require, in particular, education for invention: Young people should be engaged in practicing personal and social-creative competencies, including nonroutine problemsolving, invention capacity, entrepreneurial skills, and risk-taking adaptability, and skills related to effective teamwork and the creating and sharing of knowledge from the beginning of education. Coping with constantly changing work environments requires epistemic fluency (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2017) in terms of adaptive integration of formal and informal knowledge for solving complex problems. All citizens need to be more capable of seeing things from fresh perspectives, enhanced creative self-efficacy, and associated identities as potential inventors or creators of knowledge (Bereiter, 2002;Hakkarainen et al., 2004). ...
... Such iterative maker activities nurture various habits of the mind (values, attitudes, and thinking skills) when children begin making sense of complex problems to create solutions (Martin, 2015;Vossoughi & Bevan, 2014;Worsley & Blikstein, 2016). Participation in knowledge-creating learning fosters interest-driven sociodigital participation and assists in interconnecting informal and formal learning experiences (Ito et al., 2013), thereby improving students' epistemic fluency (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2017). Participation in co-invention projects deepens students' sociodigital competencies, especially their artistic and technical digital skills (Laakso et al., 2021). ...
Knowledge creation through maker practices and the role of teacher and peer support in collaborative invention projects
Article
Full-text available
  • Jun 2024
This study analyzed collaborative invention projects by teams of lower-secondary (13–14-year-old) Finnish students. In invention projects, student teams design and make materially embodied collaborative inventions using traditional and digital fabrication technologies. This investigation focused on the student teams’ knowledge creation processes by examining how they applied maker practices (i.e., design process, computer engineering, product design, and science practices) in their co-invention projects and the effects of teacher and peer support. In our investigations, we relied on video data and on-site observations, utilizing and further developing visual data analysis methods. Our findings assist in expanding the scope of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) research toward sociomaterially mediated knowledge creation, revealing the open-ended, nonlinear, and self-organized flow of the co-invention projects that take place around digital devices. Our findings demonstrate the practice-based, knowledge-creating nature of these processes, where computer engineering, product design, and science are deeply entangled with design practices. Furthermore, embodied design practices of sketching, practical experimenting, and working with concrete materials were found to be of the essence to inspire and deepen knowledge creation and advancement of epistemic objects. Our findings also reveal how teachers and peer tutor students can support knowledge creation through co-invention.
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... These higher modes of knowledge involve uncertainty in their own way (Savin-Baden, 2014, p. 8): initial uncertainty about what the disciplinary insights are, how they interconnect, how they can best be combined to answer a research question and where the knowledge gaps are. It is beneficial for students engaging in interdisciplinary research to use these modes of knowledge and to express and develop epistemic fluency (Markauskaite and Goodyear, 2017). Epistemic fluency is closely related to skills in interdisciplinary collaboration as it involves "A capacity that allows people to embrace and combine different kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing that are relevant to encountered tasks in a broad range of contexts" (Trede et al., 2019, p. 179). ...
Facilitating epistemic fluency of undergraduate students during the interdisciplinary research process
Article
Full-text available
  • Apr 2023
Introduction In this article we show how students share knowledge when integrating disciplinary insights in an interdisciplinary research project. More specifically, this research looks at how students communicate to create a shared mental model during moderated sessions with use of CoNavigator as an interdisciplinary collaboration tool or Miro as an online mind map tool. The study focuses on the interdisciplinary capstone of the Liberal Arts and Sciences bachelor program at Utrecht University (LAS), where students collaborate in multidisciplinary groups by going through the interdisciplinary research process (IRP).This process asks students to define an interdisciplinary research question, to define disciplinary insights and combine each other’s disciplinary insights to create a more comprehensive understanding of their research question. The integration of disciplinary insights requires working with different perspectives and acknowledging uncertainty, thereby requiring epistemic fluency and higher modes of knowledge. This research looks at how a structured session with CoNavigator or Miro can help students use these processes when integrating insights. Methods Seven groups participated in this research, with whom we moderated a session using either CoNavigator or Miro at the start of the integration phase with the purpose of sharing disciplinary insights and finding common ground. We observed each group, looking at communication related to construction, constructive conflict and co-construction. In addition, we looked at evaluation of the tool immediately after the session and the assessment of the integration chapter of all groups. Results We found that each phase of the moderated session elicited different responses in terms of constructive conflict and co-construction, thereby helping students to actively work with different ways of knowing and to define and connect disciplinary differences. In their communication, students show examples of epistemic fluency and higher modes of knowledge, although this did not directly translate into a better assessment of their integration chapter. Discussion These results show that discussing disciplinary differences and finding common ground through a session with CoNavigator or Miro gives students a structured way to start with their interdisciplinary integration. We argue that LAS-students exhibit epistemic fluency when working with the tools, but also develop this throughout the session. It appears that the epistemic fluency students already possess prior to the IRP can be further developed by the epistemic fluency expressed by teammates during the tool session. The practice and development of epistemic fluency will always involve uncertainties, but facilitating interdisciplinary integration in this way is valuable as it provides an opportunity to work with these uncertainties and offer students space to speak and integrate freely.
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Beyond disciplinary engagement: Researching the ecologies of interdisciplinary learning
Article
Full-text available
  • Jun 2024
  • J LEARN SCI
The importance of engaging students with complex societal challenges has led to the adoption of various interdisciplinary teaching and learning practices in both K-12 and higher education. However, interdisci-plinary learning is one of the most complex domains of contemporary educational practice, and, despite its significance, remains significantly undertheorized and under-researched. This Special Issue highlights empirical research efforts toward understanding interdisciplinary learning in its complexity. It simultaneously aims to 1) advance ecological perspectives that encompass concepts and methodologies for studying complex heterogeneous learning practices and 2) apply these perspectives to the research of interdisciplinary learning-of how people learn across and beyond disciplines. This introduction provides a historical context for interdisciplinary learning, introduces an ecological stance toward researching learning across and beyond disciplines, and reviews critical theoretical and methodological challenges within interdisciplinary learning, arguing that the field of the learning sciences is well-positioned to address these challenges. It discusses how the contributions presented in this special issue shed light on theoretical , methodological, empirical, and design aspects of interdisciplinary learning and offer a basis for further design work and research.
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Design Thinking and Other Approaches: How Different Disciplines See, Think and Act
Book
  • Jun 2024
Efforts to promote creativity often centre on encouraging people to engage in 'design thinking,' 'systems thinking' and 'entrepreneurial thinking.' These different approaches are most often defined, taught and applied in mutual isolation, which has obscured what distinguishes them from each other, what they have in common and how they might be combined. These three approaches are also most often described in isolation from the approaches that characterise other disciplines, all of which are relevant to how problems are identified, framed and solved. These other approaches include 'computational thinking,' 'engineering thinking,' 'scientific thinking,' 'evolutionary thinking,' 'mathematical thinking,' 'statistical thinking,' 'geographical thinking,' 'historical thinking,' 'anthropological thinking,' and many more. Examining these approaches as a set allows each of them to be better understood, and also reveals the connections and contrasts between them. Such comparisons provide the foundation for a more coordinated project to represent how different disciplinary approaches contribute to creative work.
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Creating Transformative Research–Practice Partnership in Collaboration with School, City, and University Actors
Article
Full-text available
  • Apr 2024
Traditional educational research has been criticized for the gap between the research and practice communities, meaning that outcomes do not transfer to educational praxis. To meet this challenge, policymakers, funders, and researchers are developing research–practice partnerships (RPPs). The purpose of this research is to study the research–practice partnership as a strategy for educational transformation in the Finnish educational context. This study highlights the multifaceted perspectives of key RPP stakeholders: teachers, principals, municipality administrators, and researchers. Their experiences were explored through semi-structured interviews. The data were examined through content analysis and categorized into themes depicting the goals and goal-setting process in RPPs, the experiences of RPP activities, and the factors facilitating and challenging RPPs. The results show that stakeholders viewed the goals through the perspectives of professional development; supporting the growth and learning of students; and developing school, municipality, and research practices. Regular participation solidified the commitment to the RPP process. Horizontal interaction worked well between stakeholders, but challenges arose with vertical interaction. We found multiple roles for researchers and municipality administrators. Researchers found that they take on a new role in RPPs as change agents and facilitators. Regarding the facilitating or challenging aspects of RPPs, an open and flexible attitude and atmosphere and readiness for change are demanded on all actor levels. Mutual appreciation and sensitivity facilitate RPP activities. We propose taking all stakeholder perspectives into account when designing RPPs aimed at systemic change and that RPP processes should facilitate both horizontal and vertical interaction.
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Why and how academics become interdisciplinary researchers early in their careers
Article
  • Apr 2024
  • High Educ Res Dev
The complexity of interdisciplinary research, including the time needed to understand multiple approaches and develop skills, within a university structure organised in disciplines, means that interdisciplinary research can be difficult for a developing researcher. However, early- and mid-career researchers (EMCRs) are key to the future of interdisciplinary research. This paper asks, ‘Why and how do EMCRs become interdisciplinarians?’ It draws on analysis of interviews supplemented by ethnographic observations from a research project exploring the development of interdisciplinary expertise in universities. This paper outlines six common intersecting career pathways through which EMCRs come to work across disciplines. The diverse and often ad hoc nature of interdisciplinary research careers implies that support systems, resources and training need to be adaptive and flexible. Full text available through open publishing.
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Vormgeving en ondersteuning van interdisciplinair onderwijs
Article
Full-text available
  • Dec 2023
Dit artikel bespreekt de vormgeving en ondersteuning van interdisciplinair onderwijs in een onderwijscontext waar multidisciplinaire studententeams samenwerken aan een interdisciplinair vraagstuk. Specifiek wordt hierbij aandacht besteed aan het faciliteren van de integratie van inzichten en kritische reflectie tijdens het interdisciplinaire onderzoeksproces. Het interdisciplinaire onderzoeksproces biedt een overzicht van stappen die studenten doorlopen bij het doen van interdisciplinair onderzoek, zoals het analyseren van disciplinaire inzichten en het creëren van common ground. Twee voorbeelden worden gegeven van activiteiten die studenten helpen om disciplinaire inzichten te delen en tot een common ground te komen, door studenten de juiste stappen te laten doorlopen en relevante vragen te laten stellen. Naast de integratie van inzichten is kritische reflectie tijdens alle stappen belangrijk, zowel op de uitkomsten van het interdisciplinaire onderzoek als op het eigen leerproces. Het voorbeeld dat wordt gegeven laat zien hoe reflectie op meerdere niveaus gestimuleerd kan worden: op de literatuur over interdisciplinariteit, over het eigen leerproces en de eigen houding ten opzichte van interdisciplinariteit. De discussie staat stil bij andere mogelijke methoden voor het vormgeven van interdisciplinair onderwijs, waarbij het belang van tools wordt onderstreept voor een optimale leerervaring.
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