New Educational Mission

The last chapter proposes to go not only beyond the epistemic dimension to improve it, but also beyond the lesson content. The German's lesson shows how easily we can exceed students' expectations and arouse their curiosity, enthusiasm, and learning investment. If we aspire to decrease school violence, bullying, and delinquency, a new educational mission would be to surpass teaching without necessarily being demanding or time-consuming. Indeed, making use of the relational dimension—using the multiple intelligence and STEAM approaches to include students through competence—seemss to refer to the new school mission as an aspiration builder rather than a selection referee and inducer of discouragement.

Epistemic Inclusion and STEM

It is extremely difficult to maintain interest in an IQ-considered domain when the student is convinced of being ungifted. Hybrid scientific teaching that promotes using combined science, technology, engineering, and mathematics reasoning to resolve problems can be used jointly with epistemic inclusion (making students feel competent and encouraged to acquire and display their competence in their own manner) to arouse students' curiosity and interest. Indeed, those who are convinced of their own incompetency can excel once teachers break the scheme related to their reputation, proving to them that they are competent.

The Three-Step Responsive Flexibility Procedure as an Invisible Fuel of Epistemic Inclusion

In our everyday lives, we are used to communicating spontaneously, looking for confirmation of our impressions and opinions, and finding an audience for our emotions among colleagues. We maintain the same behavior toward people based on the impression we formed about them, which gives us an illusion of stability of their character and frequency of their behavior. “They are always like that,” we seem to say, without giving them a chance to show another facet of their personality or competence, as if the circumstances of the situation do not matter. You only have to change the conditions, and people start to react differently. Hence, by changing the configuration of situational factors, we can influence students' learning investment and arouse their potential. To do so, we need to be curious not about our colleagues' opinions but rather about new information related to the situation to stimulate our reasoning and identify the source of the problem.

Nurturing Everyone's Intelligence Through Epistemic Inclusion

Epistemic inclusion can also be combined with the multiple-intelligence conception. Teachers can make students feel competent and encourage them to acquire and display their competence in their own manner and rhythm, departing from their intelligences and using the model of effective teaching. Hence, once students are captivated by a subject thanks to the disciplinary language, materials that they appreciate, and an effective transmission approach, teachers can start to use the elements relevant to other intelligences to develop them as well. If teachers provide students with high-level opportunities regardless of their reputation and are ready to be surprised, the changes can go beyond their wildest dreams; for example, visual art students from a class considered low-level and unruly could end up going to the Venice biennial of their own initiative following high-level visual art teaching.

Epistemic Inclusion

Although the identification of students' needs helps us to understand what they are going through and why they changed their behavior or motivation, it does not indicate what to do to improve the students' situation or how to solve their difficult situation. In this chapter, the authors familiarize the reader with epistemic inclusion and how it helps us to transform students' problematic situations into learning ones. They come back to students they already know and go through their situations. Hence, in this chapter, they discover how they can improve the motivation, enthusiasm, learning investment, and school well-being of Valentine, Mathilde, Perceval, Victor, Clara, Coline, Luca, Natacha, the 9th-year class, and the students from a school with gangs using epistemic inclusion.

Behind the Windowpane of Learning

After reviewing the useful concepts, the authors follow their main characters, analyzing the indicators for their potential needs that could be sources of antisocial behavior, ostracism, bullying, or selective mutism. Although all students are deficient in several needs simultaneously, some of them seem to remain behind the windowpane of learning principally because of the need to belong (Valentine, Mathilde, Perceval, Victor, Clara, Coline, Luca, Natacha, and Laura); others show some signs that first and foremost, it could be a matter of the need for self-affirmation (9th-year class, school with gangs).

Toward a New Dynamic Model of Diversity and Inclusion Management

Two of the most difficult obstacles in intercultural communication is the fear of others' norms, which we call “xenoprotypophobia,” and emotional attachment to one's own norms. As these two affective internal sources of information are difficult to distance oneself from, most people know about other countries very superficially, which creates misunderstandings. As culture is defined as a collection of specific solutions to universal problems, superficial knowledge about others' customs emphasizes their strange character, whereas going in depth to understand why these practices are positive for the person lets us discover the foundations of universal values, such as respect for other people or society, and thus develop the dynamic competence of diversity and inclusion.

Epistemic Inclusion and Restoring Status in the Classroom

Cohen's complex instruction provides us with several useful aspects for epistemic inclusion. Making students feel competent in several disciplines increases their resilience when facing failure and equilibrates class status to render every student important in the others' eyes. Cooperative tools are important because of their obligation of role assignment in the aim to not leave the groups to their own devices. In the second part of the chapter, the authors show through examples of real-life situations what happens if we do nothing, when we renounce intervention, pretending that teaching is exclusively related to the relational dimension. The strength of epistemic inclusion can be demonstrated here through its absence. We see that epistemic exclusion is deleterious for learning.

Art of Epistemic Reframing as a Particular Way to Include Students

When teachers are comfortable with the epistemic inclusion approach, combined with multiple intelligences and the STEM approach, another interesting complementary tool is epistemic reframing. This chapter familiarizes you with the idea of this maneuver and shows how it works in real-life educational situations. How can we make use of off-topic student interventions and comments? How can we transform the perturbations and provocations in the epistemic material to transmit them in the form of knowledge? How can we change students' perception of their learning objectives – notably, whether they are attainable or not in their eyes? How can we render them attainable? These questions are broached and illustrated by real-life situations that stage this maneuver, displaying it with all contextual nuances.

Raising the Bar

Going in depth into the implementation of epistemic inclusion in everyday practices, this chapter first displays the advances that have taken place in high expectations research. Afterwards, the authors show how together, with epistemic inclusion, the zone of action, and the feeling of being concerned, these advances in research can be useful for educational situations. They illustrate these benefits with real-life stories relating to substantial changes in students' learning attitudes: those who never read start to read, those who never wrote start to write, and those who were considered to be unruly and low level become good learners or even model students.