Planning for student-driven discussions: A revelatory case of curricular sensemaking for epistemic agency

Epistemic agency for costructuring expansive knowledge‐building practices

“…This study further investigated the teacher's role to support the emergent costructuring of student‐driven inquiry and collaboration. Deepening the existing studies on dynamic teacher roles to support student epistemic agency (Cherbow & McNeill, 2022; Harris et al, 2012; Ko & Krist, 2019; Manz & Suárez, 2018), the findings of this study and our related work (Tao & Zhang, 2021) show how the dynamic teacher roles may work out in a temporal and interactional context in alignment with students' role as epistemic agents. In this study, while the teacher used prestructured activities to kick off the human body inquiry in the early phase, she increasingly engaged students as partners to coconstruct inquiry directions and groups and reflect on their engagement.…”

“…Related to this challenge, recent research in science education searches for ways to support teachers as they make the shift in the classroom to embrace higher‐level uncertainty and dynamics and engage student agency (Ko & Krist, 2019; Manz & Suárez, 2018). Teachers need to work with students to monitor the evolving interests and ideas in their community, make sense of emergent problems, tensions, and uncertainty, and be responsive in moment‐moment actions (Cherbow & McNeill, 2022; Harris et al, 2012; Zhang et al, 2011). Complementing the research on the teacher's role, the field needs to conduct deeper research on student‐driven interactions through which they make agentic input to shaping the inquiry of their community as an evolving social activity system (C. I. Damşa et al, 2010).…”

Responsive instructional design for students' epistemic agency: Documenting episodes of principled improvisation in storyline enactment

“…This conceptualization has implications for how developers design curriculum and how teachers interpret and enact this curriculum. For developers, I contend that curricular materials need to better amplify the epistemic, conceptual, and interactive trajectories embedded in the materials (see, Cherbow & McNeill, 2022). These trajectories need to be readily apparent to the teachers so they can make design‐based decisions, both in planning and moment‐to‐moment enactment that will leverage these trajectories with their students.…”

“…Future research should continue to examine how teachers can use talk moves (Michaels & O'Connor, 2012) and the responsive teaching frameworks (e.g., Berland et al, 2020; Colley & Windschitl, 2016) in the context of PI. Additionally, future research should continue to document how teachers make sense of and use curricular materials to mobilize these trajectories and support students' epistemic agency (e.g., Cherbow & McNeill, 2022; Ko, 2021). Future research should also investigate the utility of reflective tools and protocols for teachers' PI capacity (e.g., Ko et al, 2022; Manz & Suárez, 2018).…”

“…However, the design of curriculum materials alone does not ensure that enactments will be coherent from the student's perspective. To foster coherence, teachers need the capacity to interpret and design instruction from curriculum materials (Brown, 2009) to support their students to act with epistemic agency in their storyline science work (Cherbow & McNeill, 2022; Ko & Krist, 2019; Sikorski & Hammer, 2017). Broadly, Miller et al (2018) define epistemic agency as “students being positioned with, perceiving, and acting on, opportunities to shape the knowledge building work in their classroom community” (p. 6).…”