Our aim in this chapter is to elucidate some qualities of epistemic tools and games that are brought together into assemblages for complex knowledge-rich professional work and to illustrate three main aspects of what is occurring:
- the arrays of epistemic tools that are assembled in complex professional situations – assembled, that is, into infrastructures for professional work;
- some distinct features of epistemic forms as generative devices (as modelling sites) that support the alignment of abstract knowledge and actionable knowledge; and
- how epistemic games are woven together with social and material ways of knowing, and are thus inseparable from the epistemic practice (and action).
Our reconstruction of the epistemic infrastructure draws on the materials, resources and references collected in one of our case studies, where medication review was used as an approach to prepare students for pharmacy practice and also as a part of a formal exam-based assessment. Our reconstruction draws on an extensive set of materials. However, we illustrate the main epistemic qualities of the epistemic artefacts that were created by using examples of completed works – worksheets, questions for a doctor, reports, etc. – that were included in the package for the exam assessors. (Many of these were presented when we introduced the individual epistemic games in Chapter 14.) These examples, rather than reviews completed by students, are of particular interest here, as they reveal the expectations of the pharmacists’ epistemic culture with respect to the key qualities of the epistemic products that characterise “expert” ways of knowing and making.
Source: These are extracts from Chapter 15 of Markauskaite, L., & Goodyear, P. (forthcoming, 2015). Epistemic fluency and professional education: innovation, knowledgeable action and actionable knowledge. Dordrecht: Springer. This is a close-to-final draft. Please check the final published version if you are going to quote it. The book is available from Springer’s e-shop.
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