Epistemic Agency and Resource Use in Family Science Engagement

Abstract In this multiple, comparative exploratory case study, we employed linguistic ethnographic microanalysis to explore epistemic agency and resource use in family science engagement. Epistemic agency is an essential dimension of scientific practices that positions the learners as constructors of knowledge, through their involvement in questioning, challenging, contrasting ideas, and more. Research demonstrates how informal learning environments afford children epistemic agency by providing a broad array of resources and supporting various ways of using them. Families use various resources (material, social, conceptual, epistemological, and procedural) while engaging with science at home. However, different families use resources in different ways. In this study, we explored how family members shaped the use of resources during family science engagement and how this afforded or constrained children’s epistemic agency. We compared two families, examining video recordings the families collected and focusing on four cases, two of the same activity, the “Scientific ice-cream“ experiment, initiated by the mothers and two examples of child-initiated experiments. Our findings demonstrate that although both families had similar material and procedural resources, and presumably the same conceptual resources, the social resource (the mothers in this case) had an important role in constructing the interaction differently in the activities. In a very nuanced way, both mothers negotiated who had access to the various resources (mainly material resources) and who was able to use these resources to navigate the family inquiry and construct or challenge problem-solving and decision-making. This affected the children’s role, participation, and epistemic agency in the interaction.