A comment made by someone I respect caused me to ponder further on the novice expert paradigm. My original reflection on this topic covered my internal struggle with the novice expert paradigm and the incorporation of student voices in education. One perspective on this paradigm views a comparison of novices to experts as focusing on what students cannot do, reinforcing a deficit perspective of students. My mentor commented that the “hesitation” to center the student perspective in educational experiences “stems from assumptions of novices being incapable,” which sparked further thoughts on this subject.

Incorporating real world phenomenon in science education is one way to get student voices in the conversation, this usually involves eliciting student’s current understanding on how some aspects of the world works. This approach centers phenomenon in educational experiences, turning such experiences into an epistemic journey, full of uncertainty. For example, a teacher could begin a unit on forces and motion by asking students how they could design a car to be safe. Then after eliciting their understanding about crumple zones, air bags, and other such ideas students mention, the instructor could design further educational experiences to investigate those ideas, such as testing different materials for their ability to reduce the impact from a cart on an incline using a force sensor. I have heard educators push back on this approach to science education, claiming that students could not possibly know how to do such things, or understand forces, time, momentum, impulse, or energy. Well, I would disagree, depending on what things we are taking about. For phenomenon that students are familiar with, they are quite capable of asking questions or reaching conclusions. For example, during a unit on stoichiometry, I asked students to think about their impact on the environment thought their personal use of chemicals and materials. Then I asked students to model this impact, giving them guiding questions. One student who often struggled to engage in my class, connected his job as a Starbucks barista to impacting the environment, i.e., food waste disposed of at the end of his shift. Is that not incredible!

But as I said, this depends on what things we are taking about. If I ask that same student to predict and explain the product of a chemical reaction, given the reagents and reaction conditions, they would be unable to draw a possible reaction mechanism. How could they if they did not have any experience with organic reaction mechanisms or the observations which inform the theories of how molecules react. Those observations have been made over centuries and have led to a useful explanatory description of how the world works. How does one acquire such experience?

Well, you could go on an epistemic journey, full of uncertainty, asking questions, gathering evidence, asking more questions, looking for correlations, completing experiments, looking for causation, developing models. Or one could be guided on an epistemic journey by a more experienced individual. This could involve the former list of actions, and possibly experiences that involve listening, copying, following, discussing, asking, answering.

But why would you go on such a journey? To what end? I feel as though this is somehow connected to the purpose of education, the purpose of educational experiences, and the motivation for engaging in such a journey. I do not believe the novice-expert paradigm is an either/or proposition, but in such a dichotomy, there is a continuum. I wonder what others might thing of the dichotomization of knowing. Perhaps there a problem with such a stance in the first place

JLS