Epistemic Practices in Everyday Family Interactions

In contemporary science education environments, children are being asked to adopt a science worldview. For some, this may require negotiation between their everyday worldview(s), a science classroom worldview, and a science worldview. Worldviews, an idea from anthropology sometimes borrowed by science education, are theorized to contain culturally informed epistemic and conceptual elements. In this dissertation I undertake an exploration of some epistemic elements of children's everyday worldviews within the context of their family life, with the perspective that epistemologies can be a class of emergent phenomenon, contained in part in the rules and structures of the interactional practices of our shared practices and micro-practices. Nine families with children ages 7-9 years old and multiple years of gardening experience participated in a natural experiment using participant-collected data. Each family recorded themselves gardening, working on a science kit about their garden soil, and doing a third everyday shared practice of their choice. Using a mixed methods approach and integrating research from education, developmental psychology, and sociolinguistics, I engaged in three progressive phases of analysis of (a) epistemic stance-taking, (b) questioning, and (c) epistemic interactional practices. These analyses work collaboratively to empirically describe some of the epistemic machinery in these families' everyday lives, touching on areas of epistemic (un)certainty, epistemic authority, and knowledge acquisition/construction. What emerges is a picture of interesting asymmetries between parents and children, where children are epistemically forthright with little appetite for uncertainty while parents, who genuinely engage with their children as knowers, deliberately make space for themselves to be less than all-knowing in any particular situation. Together these parents and children also have ways of doing knowing together, such as managing epistemic uncertainty, which are deeply embedded in their everyday interactions. This work further contributes to our understanding of children's everyday worldviews, including how some epistemic elements vary across contexts---specifically when an activity is labeled "science" even when it is situated within everyday life in the backyard.