The epistemological framing of a discipline: Writing science in university oceanography

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine how instruction in scientific writing in a university oceanography course communicated epistemological positions of this discipline. Drawing from sociological and anthropological studies of scientific communities, this study uses an ethnographic perspective to explore how teachers and students came to define particular views of disciplinary knowledge through the everyday practices associated with teaching and learning oceanography. Writing in a scientific genre was supported by interactive CD-ROM which allowed students to access data representations from geological databases. In our analysis of the spoken and written discourse of the members of this course, we identified epistemological issues such as uses of evidence, role of expertise, relevance of point of view, and limits to the authority of disciplinary inquiry. Implications for college science teaching are drawn.fl 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 37: 691 - 718, 2000 In the ethnographic study we describe in this paper, we entered as participant-observers; we began by asking ''what's happening here?'' and found that the writing of science by students and the talking about writing by instructors (course professor and teaching assistants) led to a fertile ground for examining how questions of knowledge construction, use, and representation are interactionally communicated in teaching and learning situations. Through an iterative ethnographic research cycle of posing questions; collecting, constructing, and analyzing data; and writing an ethnography; we focused on how the writing of a scientific genre in ''Geology 4: Oceanography'' (an introductory university course) foregrounded questions concerning disciplinary knowledge, thus making visible an epistemology of science. Our treatment of these epistemological issues began by identifying their importance to the participants and continued through the examination of the instructional practices associated with learning to