Teachers' design knowledge, epistemic fluency and reflections on students' experiences

This paper presents a novel line of research into university teachers’ thinking about some of the design-like aspects of teaching. The research investigates teachers’ talk about educational design issues and about how they integrate different forms of knowledge and ways of knowing when they are reflecting on their teaching experiences and making decisions about how to improve their teaching. We use the term ‘epistemic fluency’ to describe the abilities, predispositions and practices involved in combining multiple ways of knowing. We argue that epistemic fluency can be observed in many areas of professional practice, that it is not sensible to see educational practice as something founded on a single, coherent epistemology, and that university teachers - like other people - should be seen as capable of working fluently with apparently conflicting ways of knowing. On this view, epistemological beliefs are not fixed traits but reconfigurable mental resources. In this paper we draw on a series of eight interviews we conducted with one university teacher, focusing on design decisions they had made or were considering. The interview transcripts are used to illustrate different kinds of knowledge that appeared in the teacher’s talk. A striking feature of the interview transcripts is the extensive reference the teacher makes to their students’ experiences. Much of the knowledge the teacher appears to work with, in discussing design decisions, is refracted through their students’ experiences. We discuss some of the implications of this conception of epistemic fluency in ‘teaching-as-design’ for the improvement of educational practice as well as for future research.

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