Complex Dynamics Behind the Scene: How Identity and Affect Shape Epistemic Stance in Science Teaching

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This study explores how personal epistemology is entangled with identity and affect and how such entanglements help explain the nature and emergence of teachers’ epistemic stances in the classroom. Our focal case centers around a disagreement between a mentor teacher and her teacher intern about how students should engage in scientific argumentation, a disagreement that erupted into debate during class, in front of the students. At first glance, the debate appears to be purely epistemological, a disagreement about what counts as evidence and as “good” arguments. Further exploration through interviews and other data streams, however, illustrates how modeling entanglements among epistemology, affect, and identity can best help us understand the emergence and persistence of the teachers’ epistemic stances across three days of debate. The intern’s epistemic stance turned out to emerge not from a full-fledged constructivist epistemology of learning but from entangled epistemological and socioemotional commitments to encourage curiosity and to not shut students down. The mentor teacher’s epistemic stance, on the other hand, was driven by epistemological beliefs about the empirical nature of science and evidence, beliefs that help constitute aspects of her identity. We see two key takeaways. First, with respect to informing teacher education and professional learning, it matters whether researchers model these entanglements in terms of separable but interacting epistemological, affective, and identity-related elements or in terms of co-constitutive elements that are, for instance, simultaneously epistemological and identity-related. Second, and relatedly, researchers should consider different modeling choices for their data instead of a priori choosing a separable-but-interacting rather than a co-constitutive modeling framework, or vice versa.