In an article written in 2007, Peter Goodyear and Maria Zenios create an argument for the inclusion of epistemic activity in the pedagogy of higher education to help develop epistemic fluency in post secondary students as well as provide a framework for linking knowledge and behaviour.  On his website, Goodyear describes epistemic fluency as “the capacity to understand, switch between and combine different kinds of knowledge and different ways of knowing about the world” (retrieved from:  https://epistemicfluency.com).  Despite Goodyear and Zenios’ article being written in support of university level education, we feel the principle behind using epistemic activity to develop epistemic fluency in higher education is still relevant to our program design for a couple of different reasons.  

 

Our primary reason for choosing epistemic activity as a design focus for student learning is basically grounded in pragmatism.  As mentioned in our section on using a guided mastery based pedagogy, “guided mastery works to prepare students for the natural environment”.  Education critics often point to the fact that formal education can be very good at producing what people have called 'inert knowledge (Renkl et al., 1996; Whitehead, 1929), which is less useful than working knowledge, since, as Bandura points out, “potential is not fully realized if training programs do not provide sufficient practice to achieve proficiency in the modeled skills or if they lack an adequate transfer program that provides success with the new skills in the natural environment” (p. 189).  Since realizing potential is at the core of developing student resilience and self-efficacy, transforming ‘inert knowledge’ into 'working knowledge' should be the top priority of our design, and largely depends upon chances to apply knowledge in situations that matter to the student, improving motivation, and which bear a resemblance to situations of likely future application, developing self-efficacy and resilience.  

 

The other reason for choosing epistemic fluency as our primary design principle is because it strengthens our choice to use collaboration as a teaching method.  Returning to Goodyear and Zenios’ (2007) article, they suggest that a strong element of this type of learning is that collaboration in authentic knowledge-creation activities, coupled with a growing sense of oneself as a legitimate and valued member of a knowledge-building community, is essential to the development of an effective knowledge-worker; and that discussion has a central role in collaborative knowledge-building and in epistemic activity more generally.  We also learned that people get better at playing epistemic games by playing with people who are already better at it than they are.  Hence engagement in collaborative knowledge-building is essential to the mastery of epistemic games (Goodyear and Zenios, 2007).  Using our threshold concepts as a type of conceptual mapping tool for a guided mastery based approach, we can use the idea of playing epistemic games as a lesson focus designed to produce mastery within the individual zones of proximal development denoted by the actual threshold concepts we select to facilitate mastery.  Thus, we have mastery of the individual threshold concepts happening within various zones of proximal development and enhanced by collaboration from students in other, related zones of proximal development, situated at varying levels throughout the program, as the core engine for student learning.  This is then enhanced by a goal driven approach to the module as a whole, which sees mastery over the entire system, modelled as closely as possible to use within the natural environment, as its ultimate focus, effectively forcing students to use the skills and resources acquired from all previous levels of epistemic gaming in the production of their final epistemic activity.

 

We know that collaboration enhances learning for a number of reasons, most notably for its position between the individual and the community, allowing the student to tap into far greater knowledge reserves than would normally be available if working only individually.  The point of using epistemic games as opposed to more didactic teaching methods is because the experience of collaboration in the improvement of ideas is an essential part of an apprenticeship in knowledge (Goodyear and Zenios, 2007), and a logical path towards mastery which naturally incorporates the numerous aspects of learning that will be present within our respective modules.