Embodying epistemic responsibility

Abstract

The study explores how children deploy gaze and embodied epistemic stance displays to establish a mutual epistemic responsibility when dealing with potentially controversial questions. Drawing on video recordings of 24 peer interactions involving children aged 9-12 years, the sequential and multimodal analysis describes the practices that construct intercorporeal participation frameworks for collaborative reasoning. Findings demonstrate that children coordinate gaze and multimodal displays of epistemic stance to mobilize co-participants' attention toward their position, while at the same time subjecting it to negotiation. Furthermore, children recruit the current speaker's gaze to issue a friendly challenge to his/her pre-determined stance. When the mutual epistemic responsibility was at stake, children occasioned a recalibration of stance displays at the earliest possible place. The children's embodied participation frameworks thus reflect their orientation to knowledge as being socially constructed.