Re-Indexing Epistemic Responsibility: A Grammatical Analysis of How a Teacher Made Space for Students' Epistemic Agency

Abstract

Supporting students' epistemic agency is a key goal of science education. However, the process of realizing this goal in classrooms is complex and layered, and we have a limited understanding of how teachers draw from their practice to position students as epistemic agents, making it difficult to provide concrete actionable guidance for teachers. To address this question, we conducted a case study of one middle school teacher and her classroom to explore how she decided to make space in her instructional practice for students to take intellectual responsibility in the classroom. To capture the teacher's in-the-moment decision-making, we used point-of-view video capture followed by stimulated recall interviews. We examined classroom discourse in three select episodes where the teacher adapted her instruction in response to student contributions. By defining epistemic agency as a person's capacity to position themselves in a conversation as responsible for action, we analyzed patterns of teacher moves that positioned students as responsible for epistemic activities. We found that by linguistically indexing students as responsible consistently across the episodes, student intellectual participation increased in both quantity and depth. Importantly, these indexing actions emerged dynamically from the teacher's goals for deepening student sensemaking. These findings provide insight into a teacher's pedagogical decisions and their outcomes contribute to our understanding of how teachers can support epistemic agency.