"Pedagogy of Listening" vs. "Pedagogy of Listening to Educators": Ethnographic Research on Child Autonomy in Kindergartens in Montenegro

The paper discusses the phenomenon of child autonomy from the perspective of educators' personal epistemologies and power relations in the adult-child interaction in the practices of institutional education in Montenegro. The construct of child autonomy is approached from the standpoint of critical-constructivist theory and the self- -determination theory, as a socio-cultural product shaped by ethnopedagogies and personal epistemologies of educators. The main goal of the ethnographic study conducted in three preschool educational institutions in Montenegro was to explore the epistemological theories of educators through the analysis of institutional educational practices, given that "the ways of thinking about childhood fuse with institutionalized practices" (Prout & James, 2005, p. 22). We conclude about the existence of an objectivist epistemological theory of educators and the dominance of normative power relations in educator-child interactions, and discuss a special type of epistemological "over-power". The comparability with the results of similar research in the region is stated, and it points to a possible explanatory connection between collectivist culture and the controlling motivational style and authoritarianism in education.

Culturally Relevant Care Through the Lens of Duoethnography

Our study endeavors to explore how culturally relevant care manifests in our teaching at a predominantly Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). Through duoethnography and collaborative interpretation of narrative data from our former students, we seek to better understand our own and our students’ learning experiences. Collecting our own and our students’ perspectives and stories about lived experiences with us as professors in narrative form allows for us and our respondents to reflect and express freely--to share views, impressions, interpretations, and experiences in our/their own words. Analysis of narrative reflections provides an opportunity to craft a story, to give voice to those living within the intersection of race, ethnicity, and cross-cultural teaching–learning relationships at a predominantly Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). Findings intend to illuminate personal epistemologies (Hofer & Bendixen, 2012) and dispositions for transcending cultural, racial, and linguistic boundaries in higher education, thus providing a multifaceted collective story of cultivating care in cross-cultural teaching–learning relationships.

EFFECTS OF INQUIRY-BASED TEACHING ON CHINESE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ EPISTEMOLOGIES ABOUT EXPERIMENTAL PHYSICS AND LEARNING PERFORMANCE

Students' epistemologies of experimental physics refer to how they understand the role of experimentation as well as the experimental operation and design and communication of results in physics. This research aimed to find whether students in inquiry-based physics laboratory activities show more expert-like epistemologies of experimental physics and better course performance relative to courses using cookbook guided laboratory activities. The participants consisted of two classes of students in a Chinese university. They were divided into control group and experimental group. The experimental group was taught with inquiry-based teaching, while the control group was using cookbook teaching. Each group was taught by the same lecturer. Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics were used to investigate students’ epistemologies about the nature of experimental physics. It was found that students in a traditional cookbook guided laboratory showed significant negative shifts on personal epistemologies, and in contrast, students’ epistemologies of experimental physics in inquiry-based laboratory had been significantly improved. The increase of scores in the control group was higher than the experiment group on experimental physics learning performance. The results were slightly different from other studies, some possible explanations were given. Keywords: epistemologies of experimental physics, inquiry-based teaching, physics education

Personal epistemologies of the media: Selective criticality, pragmatic trust, and competence–confidence in navigating media repertoires in the digital age

While the perils of social media, fake news, and an alleged distrust in legacy media have attained considerable public attention, the implications of these public narratives for their audiences have remained understudied. The aim of this article is to identify consequences of an emerged “fake news and post truth-era-narrative” for media users’ personal epistemologies, media beliefs, and news navigation practices from a media repertoire perspective. Forty-nine in-depth media-biographical interviews with people from three different age groups and with different media repertoires were conducted. Based on the study, the three interrelated dimensions (1) selective criticality, (2) pragmatic trust, and (3) competence–confidence were developed to analyze users’ media and news navigation. These three dimensions can be applied to other scenarios to investigate how people navigate their media repertoires and interact with the news in general.

Epistemological Differences Between Gifted and Typically Developing Middle School Students

Students’ personal epistemologies, or their beliefs about knowledge and knowing, have a substantial impact on learning, affecting their responses to curriculum, strategy selection, and psychosocial variables. Changes in epistemological reasoning occur similarly to other stage-based developmental schemes, with qualitative shifts in worldviews at each stage. Some research suggests that gifted students tend to develop higher levels of epistemological reasoning earlier than same-aged typically developing peers. The current study extends research in developmental differences to middle school students. A total of 189 sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade gifted or typical students completed the Learning Context Questionnaire. An analysis of variance was conducted to determine differences by Gifted Status and Grade Level. Results of the analysis revealed significant differences between gifted and typical students, with modest effect size, at each grade level. The discussion includes implications for understanding giftedness and related need for rich inquiry-based learning environments.

Epistemology and Teacher Education

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article. For teachers to effectively engage in given pedagogical practices, they need to have beliefs that support these approaches to teaching. These are not philosophical beliefs per se; rather, they are the individual understandings that teachers hold about the nature of knowledge and knowing, which underpin and guide their actions and which are referred to as personal epistemologies. A wide range of paradigms for understanding and studying personal epistemologies is evident in the research literature in this field, but these different perspective and approaches—while varied in outlook and conclusion—point to how important it is that initial teacher education courses allow for the development of sophisticated personal epistemologies through explicit teaching that enables students to think ontologically and epistemologically, and that teacher educators initiate and sustain reflective and discursive practices throughout their courses to promote the best possible outcomes for the children that student teachers will go on to teach in their subsequent careers.