Epistemic Responsibility in Professor Development Interactions

Gert van der Westhuizen

Emeritus Professor, University of Johannesburg, South Africa

Gertvdw@uj.ac.za

Professor development in South Africa is confronted with challenges of cognitive justice and decolonization of education. Individual professors find themselves considering questions about the relevance of their research and knowledge contribution work, how they contribute to expansion of knowledge rights of communities, and how they overcome limitations of colonial inequities and neoliberal pressures to perform in academia.

In this context, the problematic is to understand development interactions in formal and informal settings in ways that acknowledge epistemic access and responsibility. This problematic is experienced by future orientated new teachers during their induction who, while settling in the profession, aspire to join the professoriate.

This is an inquiry is into the discursive nature of development interactions in mentoring settings among professor mentors and professor mentees. The focus is on conversations about what is involved in settling in a profession, and growing as teacher and researcher your specialization area.

The inquiry is guided by the question what is the role of knowledge in development interactions and how is knowledge used to determine specific development learning outcomes?

The objective is to describe how status and stance taking of participants shape the flow of learning conversations and how participants use what they know for learning. The goal is also to describe features of conducive and meaningful development interactions among teachers and professors.

This is an ethnomethodology study of dialogic learning, and we used the model developed by Stivers et al. (2011) on the dimensions of knowledge use in learning interactions.    

Data for the paper include recorded paired interactions on topics of professional and academic specialization. Participants from various academic fields have been involved, and the purposes of the interactions was to clarify current, emerging and anticipated future specialization.

The findings highlight participants talking in tentative terms about their professional role and knowledge specialization, while being open to exploring how their niche may advance in future. Mentors seem to benefit from their status and role, and they utilize stance taking for social actions such as inviting, prompting, pushing in their interactions. Mentors also tended to be directive in how they read the work of the mentee and how they advise future niche could unfold. During the interactions, participant talk display epistemic responsibilities aimed at materialising the learning conversation outcomes.

In the discussion, the paper proposes a framework of dialogic learning practices sensitive to how knowledge is used responsibly in development interactions.    

Conversation analysis of interactions following the the Stivers et al. (2011) model: epistemic access, primacy and responsibility. Stivers, T., Mondada, L., & Steensig, J. (2011). Knowledge, morality and affiliation in social interaction. The morality of knowledge in conversation, 3-24.

The findings highlight participants talking in tentative terms about their professional role and knowledge specialization, while being open to exploring how their niche may advance in future. Mentors seem to benefit from their status and role, and they utilize stance taking for social actions such as inviting, prompting, pushing in their interactions. Mentors also tended to be directive in how they read the work of the mentee and how they advise future niche could unfold. During the interactions, participant talk display epistemic responsibilities aimed at materialising the learning conversation outcomes.

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