Epistemic agency in student teachers’ engagement with research skills

Abstract

In today's knowledge intensive and post-factual world, student teachers' relationship towards knowledge is a vital element in learning to teach. Student teachers must have a sense of epistemic agency to see themselves as productive participants in knowledge-laden activities. However, little attention has been paid to the role of agency in the interconnections between research and teaching in higher education. This study aims to identify how epistemic agency is manifested in student teachers' expressions when they are provided with tools for knowledge production (educational research skills). Epistemic agency was examined as a narrative practice in student teachers' texts (N = 73), and a datadriven analysis was conducted. The results explore the four dimensions of professional practice towards which the students directed their epistemic agency: 'the self', 'the class', 'the research literature', and 'the everyday life'. The study makes visible the variety of how engagement with research skills can promote epistemic agency.

Enhancing the Value of Teacher Education Research

“…In another study in the context of the University of Turku programme, Heikkilä et al (2020a) found that first-year student teachers were already finding research skills helpful in several ways. The data and analysis methods were similar to the methods referred to above, although the participants were different (coming from a different study year).…”

Teachers’ agency during the Covid-19 lockdown: A new materialist perspective

“…Recently, in poststructuralist and post-modern understandings, agency has not signified merely individual teachers' will to act, but rather has been depicted as incomplete, intertwined with, and produced through the linguistic systems and other relationships within which teachers act (Loutzenheiser and Heer 2017). Some researchers have emphasised the role of language and narrative in the formation of teachers' agency (Heikkilä et al 2020a;Heikkilä, Iiskala, and Mikkilä-Erdmann 2020b;Kayi-Aydar 2019), and others have seen agency as a materialist formation -as an assemblage consisting of both human and nonhuman powers Strom 2015). Some have explicitly argued against dualist categories separating materiality and discourse, examining the immaterial (e.g., language and beliefs) in relation to teachers' agency and action in material contexts (Anwaruddin 2016).…”

Long tail metaphysics: The epistemic crisis and intellectual freedom

“…Where real-time events are impractical, or to preserve the privacy and anonymity of participants, digital and physical engagement boards can be made available, where patrons respond to prompts and engage with each other’s contributions, cooperatively generating a topical community mind map. Cultivating individual and collective epistemic virtues is fundamental to civic functioning and well-being in a complex information society, offering a kind of preventive or complementary therapy for the epistemic crisis (Eriksson and Lindberg, 2016; Hare, 2006; Heikkilä et al, 2020; Riggs, 2010).…”

“…Epistemic agency refers to the conscious control one can exert over one's habits of belief formation, and allows knowers to take responsibility, and be held accountable, for their beliefs (Fernandez, 2013;Gunn, 2020;Heikkila ¨et al, 2020;Olson, 2015). While the concept of epistemic agency is not without its critics (e.g.…”

“…Kornblith, 2012), many recognize that people are capable of higher-order thinking and reasoning, attentiveness, self-monitoring, and self-reflection, and applying some criteria to knowledge acquisition, understanding, and belief justification (Heikkila ët al., 2020;Olson, 2015;Reed, 2001;Riggs, 2010;Sosa, 2014Sosa, , 2015Tollefsen, 2006;Zagzebski, 2013). Epistemic agency involves "epistemic deliberation" or the consideration of evidence, methods, and interpretive heuristics, which themselves rely on information behaviors (Fernandez, 2013;Heikkila ¨et al, 2020;Sullivan, 2019). The selection of and participation in information-seeking and epistemicdeliberation activities confers attributability and responsibility on the epistemic agent (Fernandez, 2013).…”