Monthly Archives: May 2015

Adding chapter excerpts

We’ll be adding some excerpts from near-to-finished versions of the chapters of the Epistemic Fluency book over the next few days.

95%

I’d say we’re 95% finished on the Epistemic Fluency book, but it may be that the last 5% will take longer than we’d like.

Chapter 19 (Teaching and Learning for Epistemic Fluency) is almost done.

“We address two major questions, primed by the issues raised in Chapters 17 and 18. How can students develop:

  1. flexible conceptual resources that enable professional meaning-making and action?
  2. flexible epistemic resources that enable inquiry that produces actionable understanding?

We claim that well-designed tasks for professional learning are simultaneously professional (actionable; situated), conceptual and epistemic. Such tasks involve the weaving of epistemic forms and epistemic games that are played in professions and a dynamic – embodied and embedded – assembling of actionable concepts. These tasks stimulate discourse that integrates generic (formal) and situated (functional) kinds of knowledge, and formal and functional ways of knowing. They involve knowledge that is both: coherent and contingent, structured and experiential, explicit and tacit.”