Characterizing epistemic messages in the classroom
type: CreativeWork
description: A longstanding aim of education efforts to position students as knowledge constructors so they are engaged in the building and shaping their learning environment. Current education reforms situate student sense making around authentic science inquiries where students are engaged in the practices of science. In the science classroom, this means students are poised to figure things out by asking questions, carrying out investigations, and constructing models so that are positioned to do the intellectual work. However, structuring classroom environments so that students have more authority with respect to their learning is a challenging. Much of this work has centered on how these learning environments are designed, or function theoretically. But less is known about how teachers support students to participate with intellectual authority in real time: What does it look like when a teacher effectively develops students’ intellectual authority? In this dissertation, I answer this question by identifying the epistemic messages about learning that one teacher communicates to his students about the kind of ideas that deserve space in the classroom. A theoretical construct, epistemic messages are the implicit messages a teacher sends about the nature of knowledge and learning. How students make sense of what knowledge is valued and supported at school through the interactive and discursive routines that make up the classroom culture determine how they will participate. In this work, I take a situative perspective that views learning as happening in interaction. These interactions happen moment to moment in response to students’ ideas. Guided by these assumptions, I suggest that a teacher’s epistemic messages drive the patterns in student discourse, and that these patterns in student discourse influence how a teacher responds, as part of a recursive pattern of interaction that is constantly delivered & interactively negotiated. With this dissertation I conduct a longitudinal …
abstract: A longstanding aim of education efforts to position students as knowledge constructors so they are engaged in the building and shaping their learning environment. Current education reforms situate student sense making around authentic science inquiries where students are engaged in the practices of science. In the science classroom, this means students are poised to figure things out by asking questions, carrying out investigations, and constructing models so that are positioned to do the intellectual work. However, structuring classroom environments so that students have more authority with respect to their learning is a challenging. Much of this work has centered on how these learning environments are designed, or function theoretically. But less is known about how teachers support students to participate with intellectual authority in real time: What does it look like when a teacher effectively develops students’ intellectual authority? In this dissertation, I answer this question by identifying the epistemic messages about learning that one teacher communicates to his students about the kind of ideas that deserve space in the classroom. A theoretical construct, epistemic messages are the implicit messages a teacher sends about the nature of knowledge and learning. How students make sense of what knowledge is valued and supported at school through the interactive and discursive routines that make up the classroom culture determine how they will participate. In this work, I take a situative perspective that views learning as happening in interaction. These interactions happen moment to moment in response to students’ ideas. Guided by these assumptions, I suggest that a teacher’s epistemic messages drive the patterns in student discourse, and that these patterns in student discourse influence how a teacher responds, as part of a recursive pattern of interaction that is constantly delivered & interactively negotiated. With this dissertation I conduct a longitudinal …
author: Kelly, Susan Bromley
language: en
keywords: Epistemic Messages, Science teaching, Student Intellectual Authority
date published: 2021-03-05T21:38:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:50Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/109374