Designing for Epistemic Agency: How university student groups create knowledge and what helps them do it

Abstract

How do university students create knowledge together? Collaborative projects are part of most tertiary undergraduate programs but in-depth studies of student work outside classrooms are rare. My interest is in shared epistemic agency—how knowledge is collaboratively created. There is, naturally, a social aspect—dialogue, team roles and relationships. There is also materiality to collaboration; the objects that students create and use as thinking tools and to organise work. Sociomaterial theories of knowledge creation, putting shared objects at the centre of social learning, underpinned this study. I followed seven groups of undergraduate students, as they worked together in education and engineering courses on ill-structured assessment tasks. I used ethnographic methods, including video- and audio-recordings, and capturing artefacts and online communications and work. I made detailed transcriptions and used discourse analysis of actions and objects as well as dialogue. I mapped projects through relational diagrams tracing actors, actions, conceptual development and objects over time. I compared cases across dimensions of knowledge creation and students’ assembled infrastructure. Findings and outputs include: • Conceptualisation of a new type of epistemic object, the synthesising object, to bridge individual and shared knowledge creation. • An original method of visual analysis and representation of shared epistemic objects over multiple dimensions. • A model for epistemic agency in group tasks, outlining the interactions between what students bring to the task, the components of infrastructure supporting knowledge work, and design. • The importance of early stages of projects: students bring dispositions that help them understand and frame epistemic work. • A set of design principles for shared epistemic agency, working collaboratively on knowledge in a specific context. A long-term strategy, targeted activities, deliberate practice and reflection are key.