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Epistemic Resourcefulness for Actionable Knowing

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Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education

Part of the book series: Professional and Practice-based Learning ((PPBL,volume 14))

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Abstract

This chapter mirrors Chap. 17, while shifting the focus to epistemic resourcefulness. We look at how epistemic resources are treated in accounts of the mind and accounts of discourse; both have to be combined in a satisfactory account of epistemic thought and action. We use the case study of preservice teachers’ planning to explain the nature of epistemic resources and to introduce the notion of ‘framing’. Framing is a way of describing how people make sense of a new situation – answering the question ‘what is going on here?’ It helps us to understand what enables people to address the challenges they encounter in work: whether they can respond in innovative and productive, or unproductive, ways. We show that, in solving professional challenges, framing depends upon epistemic resourcefulness – including an ability to coordinate diverse ways of knowing and acting in the world.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note, we are not arguing that the team members have abstract (formal) conceptual knowledge. They do not express their understanding in any normative language. However, they have sufficient contextual (functional) knowledge to be able to see the pedagogical value of visual representations in this activity.

  2. 2.

    Cf. Harry Collins (2010) view, which we outlined in Chap. 4.

  3. 3.

    This situation is different from classroom studies in which the main prompt for changing the frame comes from the class teacher (Elby & Hammer, 2010; Louca et al., 2004).

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  1. Centre for Research on Learning and Innovation (CRLI), Faculty of Education & Social Work, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Lina Markauskaite & Peter Goodyear

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  1. Lina Markauskaite
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  2. Peter Goodyear
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Markauskaite, L., Goodyear, P. (2017). Epistemic Resourcefulness for Actionable Knowing. In: Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education. Professional and Practice-based Learning, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4369-4_18

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