The findings allow me to claim that my innovative pedagogy, produces shared epistemic agency. The pedagogy, based on the knowledge creation principles and iteratively refined through action research. What also emerged from the analysis is a different way of looking at shared epistemic agency. I moved from seeing shared epistemic agency as a discrete set of distinctive behaviours. I now have a more holistic view of its inseparable connection with student participation and community practice.
The Student as a Participant.
The “student as a Participant” can temporarily and flexibly position themselves reflexively as a learner, knower, or facilitator. They can be positioned interactionally as knowers or facilitators, and institutionally by the pedagogy as facilitators in the classroom community. These positions are indicative of the qualities of shared epistemic agency.
The learner position
As a learner, the Participant
- Can control their knowing and unknowing and the ways they extend their knowledge;
- The learner is knowledgeable of what they do not know, and is not knowledge-less
- Productive of knowledge building interactions that lead to the creation of New Knowledge. This competent learner has the potential to be transformative.
The knower position
As a knower,
- Participants have epistemic authority based on their competence in epistemic interactions,
- Interdependent to a learner, and are
- Relationally responsive to an assumed unknowing.
The facilitator position
When positioned as a facilitator of learning in the classroom community,
- Participants blend their control of the learning process with the authority of other Participants in the classroom, and
- Negotiate control of the learning process based on their relative skill and experience in a given context.
I consider the Participant described in this study competent in the learning environment. They possess the agency required to assume control, responsibility, and authority for their knowledge through mutual and self-positioning. This competence, which renders Participants as equals within a democratic classroom community, is not hard-won; it does not require a sweeping social movement or radical change to the structure of the role of the teacher to surface but only needs to be made visible by such practices as I have implemented in my pedagogy.
In presenting the Participant as competent, I have partly achieved the aims of this study. I argue for considering the students in my class as active Participants in the classroom. They take responsibility for their learning and contribute to and are constituted by a learning community. The broader aim was to present to the mathematics education community a different approach to classroom pedagogy in the context of the school curriculum. I hope it is clear that the Participant is trustworthy, responsible for and expected to possess knowledge. If nurtured, the Participant could transform education.
The classroom as a Learning Community
My mathematics classroom emerged as a community of Participants with a practice of learning mathematics through interaction. This interaction was democratic, because all Participants experienced taking part in all aspects of the innovative pedagogy, and the contributions of each were valued and acknowledged.
This Learning Community was productive of new mathematical knowledge based on the Participants’ exercise of agency in exploring external sources. This allowed them to arrive at the classroom with the seeds of knowledge for shared development. Through epistemic interaction with other Participants, they shared, challenged, and modified this knowledge and, in this way, made sense of the mathematics. Hence, the Learning Community created knowledge from within to advance their knowledge as a whole.
This Learning Community was a product of how the community interpreted the enactment of the pedagogy. The Pedagogy did not prescribe specific practices for the Learning Community. The practices emerged by itself through Participants’ enactment of the pedagogy, and is an index of their participation.
Sustaining Shared epistemic agency.
The second research question originated from my encounters with other researchers’ endeavours to sustain student engagement in long-term, high-level, knowledge building activities and discourses. I assert that it was a Learning Community developed through Participants’ interactions, that sustained shared epistemic agency. It was what the community defined as competence and their resulting accountability to the practice that sustained the emergence of shared epistemic agency anew in each lesson
Competence
I contend in this section that:
- The Learning Community defined competence as participation in what mattered to them.
- Advancing mathematics knowledge mattered to the Learning Community
Thus, participation as a learner, knower, and facilitator constituted competence in the Learning Community, and also shaped what it meant to learn mathematics. It is how the Learning Community defines competence that sustains the emergence of shared epistemic agency.
Accountability
I further argued that:
- As Participants engaged with the Learning Community, they continuously negotiated their identity of belonging to it.
- They developed identities of belonging when their competent performance was reified by other Participants.
- Identities of belonging made Participants accountable to the practice of the Learning Community.
- As the Participants participated again and again, and as their participation was reified as competent again and again, their identity of belonging to the practice of the Learning Community was renegotiated again and again.
Hence, Participants’ identities of belonging, established their accountability to the practice of the Learning Community. Hence accountability to its aims of advancing collective knowledge. These identities were cautiously negotiated by the interplay of participation and reification.
I argued that the Learning Community, by its definition of competence and accountability to the practice of how Participants learnt mathematics, sustained the continued emergence of shared epistemic agency, even as students continued their studies in a new environment in Year 11.
The teacher as an Educator
Reflecting on the action research process, I presented the notions of the teacher as an Educator and the innovative pedagogy as the necessary means for initiating the development of the Participant and their Learning Community.
I present the teacher as an Educator whose purpose is to draw out from Participants their latent potential. The potential to take responsibility for the advancement of their mathematics knowledge. This responsibility is a necessary condition for the development of their status as a Participant in a Learning Community. In this sense, I present the Educator as necessary for the development of shared epistemic agency, and ultimately, as serving the purpose of the pedagogy.
The innovative pedagogy
The innovative pedagogy, with its aims of installing participation and empowerment, recognises that each Participant engages with the learning process differently. It recognises that they will bring their personalities, experiences, and background to the enactment. This uniqueness could give the impression that the findings of this study could apply only in the context of the study’s participants. However, I contend that this study’s contributions to the field of mathematics education point to its generalisability. I present these contributions in the next chapter.
Mutual uncertainty appears as a characteristic of the pedagogy. I started the pedagogy unsure of how the participants would enact it and its impact on their mathematics learning. Through the action research process, I had to constantly renegotiate its terms and structures in response to developments in the shape of daily interactions and learning. At the same time, the Participants engage in epistemic interactions uncertain of their mathematics knowledge but resiliently building on each other’s knowledge. Dealing with uncertainty contrasts with the structured and established practice of conventional pedagogy. However, I argue that what is required is for teachers to accept that a pedagogy based on uncertainty is of interest.