Epistemic Objects and Tools on the School Grounds: Addressing Plant Blindness and Knowledge Construction

ABSTRACT Plants mediate the supply of energy and matter for all animals, including human beings yet we are faced with “plant blindness” whereby we pay limited attention to and accord little value to plants. Plant blindness is evident in school curricula whereby students have limited opportunities to learn about plants. This paper proposes and illustrates how students' understanding and awareness of plants might be enhanced by building connections with the native kōwhai trees in their school grounds as epistemic objects and epistemic tools. Kōwhai are endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand and play a significant role in Māori cultural knowledge and the local environment. In our study, we examined how a primary school teacher created opportunities for a class of 22 Year 5–6 students (age 8–10 years) to enhance their plant awareness. Through audio‐recording, field notes, photographs and student work, and interviews with the teacher, we report our findings as vignettes that reconstruct key aspects of the 1‐week teaching and learning sequence. Tasked with creating infographics about the kōwhai for school visitors, students engaged in various observation activities by iteratively visiting the kōwhai trees in situ and specimens from them in the classroom. We argue that the features and location of the trees on the school grounds, along with the learning community the teacher created, transformed the kōwhai trees and the infographic design into objects of inquiry (epistemic objects) and tools for knowledge construction (epistemic tools) which supported an increase in student plant awareness.