This qualitative study (based on a hermeneutic moral-realist interpretive frame (Yanchar & Slife, 2017)) explored question asking as it unfolded in the everyday practice of being a student in a graduate course on design thinking (with an emphasis on design in education). Findings are presented as four key tensions that occurred within the complex classroom setting under investigation: “theory and overlapping practices,” “convergence and divergence,” “participation and reticence,” and “give and take.” Overall, these thematized tensions point to a dynamic interplay between student agency and the common good of the class. These findings have significant implications for understanding student questioning experiences and the study of classroom interactions.

Prior research on student question-asking has primarily been conducted from a cognitive, epistemological standpoint. In contrast, we present a hermeneutic-phenomenological investigation that emphasizes the moral-practical context in which question-asking functions as a situated way of being in the midst of practice. More particularly, we present a hermeneutic study of student question-asking in a graduate seminar on design theory (i.e., a seminar focused on theory and philosophy of design, emphasizing the work of design scholars such as Simon, Cross, Krippendorff, and Lawson). The study offers a unique moral-practical perspective on this commonly studied phenomenon. Our analysis yielded four themes regarding the moral-practical intricacies of question-asking in this setting, with a particular focus on time-related constraints on participation, various types of background understanding, and value-laden expectations that participants encountered in this complex ecology of practice.

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