Mapping Teachers’ Epistemic Beliefs in Collegial Planning

Nordgren explores a complementary path to teachers’ epistemic cognition that goes beyond the predominant focus on individual thinking. Based on a longitudinal project that follows teachers engaged in planning in subject-based teams, this chapter focuses on how teachers’ epistemic beliefs evolve in the act of pedagogical recontextualization. Methodologically, the collegial setting allows real-time access to teachers’ negotiations and decisions about content, learning goals, sequencing, and adjustments to students’ needs, without the filters of questionnaires and interviews. Theoretically, the findings problematize the analytical use of categorical epistemic stances and the separation of epistemic from non-epistemic objectives within teachers’ epistemic beliefs. Nordgren thus shows how history teachers’ planning takes place within an intricate web of epistemic choices regarding ontological assumptions, classroom management, and almost everything in between.