ERIC Number: EJ1384304
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2023
Pages: 17
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-2154-8455
EISSN: EISSN-2154-8463
Shifts of Epistemic Agency between Children and Parents during Making at Museum-Based Makerspace
Jung, Yong Ju; Whalen, Devon Purington; Zimmerman, Heather Toomey
International Journal of Science Education, Part B: Communication and Public Engagement, v13 n1 p1-17 2023
Epistemic agency is situated within social, cultural, and material contexts of learning. Making and inventing supports children's and families' creative thinking, problem-solving, and knowledge construction, through which they are positioned as active knowledge agents and their epistemic agency is represented. This article examines how the epistemic agency of children and parents shifted as they engaged in making activities in a museum-based makerspace. Through video-based, multimodal interaction analysis of thirteen cases, our findings demonstrate moment-by-moment transition patterns between child-led, parent-led, and equally-distributed epistemic agency. Our findings also show how these epistemic agency shifts emerged through the families' embodied interactions. By doing so, we reveal that (a) the lead epistemic agent role shifted over time during the inventing experience and (b) the epistemic agency of a parent and a child were relative to each other. This study contributes to the theoretical understanding of epistemic agency in situ during collaborative making activities as a fluid phenomenon as well as provides practical implications for museum-based makerspaces to support parent-child knowledge-building interactions during inventing.
Descriptors: Epistemology, Parent Child Relationship, Informal Education, Museums, Shared Resources and Services, Family Involvement, Interaction, STEM Education
Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: District of Columbia
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A