Epistemics and Education

Abstract

By engaging in the epistemic practices of a disciplinary area, students are able to build their capacity for learning and expand their repertoire for reasoning. These epistemic practices are intrinsic to knowledge-producing communities and need to be examined from a sociocultural perspective. In this paper, I describe epistemic practices and the related topics of epistemic and ontological cognition and epistemic tools. I consider the epistemological commitments of the communities constructing knowledge and the spheres of application for epistemics in education. These epistemic domains of education are each illustrated with examples from curriculum design. The value and limitations of the perspective are discussed. In a post-script, I answer common questions about the uses of epistemic practices in education.