Researching Epistemic Practices Development With Multimodal Narratives

Abstract

This chapter describes an empirical study using multimodal narratives for research into students' development of epistemic practices in the classroom. Multimodal narratives can give access to classroom events, preserving their complex and holistic nature. Through content analysis, they allow a good comprehension of the multimodal nature of teaching and learning practices. The results of this work highlight the importance of multimodal narratives as a research instrument. Their importance is based on the richness of elements they contain that allow the identification, categorization, and characterization of teacher mediation actions that promote, scaffold, and enlarge students' epistemic practice development. This chapter seeks to describe both their multiple potentialities as an instrument and their limitations when researching the development of students' epistemic practices in the physical sciences classroom.

Knowledge and perception of middle school students regarding COVID‐19 disease at the start of the pandemic

“…Epistemic practices can be defined as social activities of production, communication and evaluation of knowledge, which require the knowledge and experience of others, in order to learn to deal with uncertainty, articulate ideas in public forums, make use of evidence, take into account the ethical conclusions from their investigations, reaching consensus and making decisions. 11 Taking into consideration the need to increase student's scientific literacy in order to allow them to move in the middle of huge amount of information circulating in newspapers, television and social networks, it was important to design curricular activities, delivered remotely, that still allow them to develop important epistemic practices (e.g., research and select information, organize information, identify patterns, questioning, make predictions, communicate, and validate knowledge). Given the fact that we were facing a new disease, students' lack of knowledge was a reality and some misconceptions were being constructed.…”