“Well That's How the Kids Feel!”—Epistemic Empathy as a Driver of Responsive Teaching
While research shows that responsive teaching fosters students' disciplinary learning and equitable opportunities for participation, there is yet much to know about how teachers come to be responsive to their students' experiences in the science classroom. In this work, we set out to examine whether and how engaging teachers as learners in doing science may support responsive instructional practices.
In this article, the authors present evidence from teachers' reflections that this stability was supported by the teachers' intellectual and emotional experiences as learners. Specifically, they argue that engaging in extended scientific inquiry provided a basis for the teachers having epistemic empathy for their students—their tuning into and appreciating their students' intellectual and emotional experiences in science, which in turn supported teachers' responsiveness in the classroom.
