Epistemic status as an analytic tool: Mapping classroom talk and participation in a middle grades prototyping testing activity

Abstract

This article takes up Heritage's (2012a) gradient model of epistemic stance as an analytical tool to explore the use of questions during a geoscience activity in which students test prototypes to withstand seismic activity. Analyzing unfolding classroom talk advances an understanding of collaboration and student agency to reveal the ways a teacher and students are positioned as knowledgeable in the classroom context through the relationship between epistemic status, epistemic stance and territories of knowledge. Rules and roles for three different participation frames emerged: teacher as knower, students as knowers, and students as collaborators. Contributing to research that investigates how students and teachers make sense of relational aspects of design activity, this article offers a useful method for analyzing classroom discourse with implications for how teachers might signal and assemble participation frames that foreground students’ authentic contributions in a constructivist learning environment.