Search

This study explores how and why simulation training facilitates professional learning by investigating how simulators and simulations are used and conceptualized in two professional domains, nursing and maritime navigation, and offer a reconceptualization. Our aim is to move beyond past theorizing of simulators and simulations that has mainly centered on representational issues like validity, fidelity, and authenticity. Instead, we approach simulators as epistemic objects and simulations as epistemic practices. These concepts offer a lens to examine the situated and sociomaterial practices that make simulators into simulations and simulations into entry points to the epistemic culture of a profession. As a result, we pinpoint three central mechanisms for transforming the simulation experience into an event that facilitates the enrollment of students into their future profession. The first mechanism involves the instructional practice of “filling in” aspects of the work context that might be missing in the simulator. The second mechanism, sometimes labeled the “as-if” mode of simulations, manifests through the participants’ ongoing commitment to treat the simulation as-if it was a real professional encounter. The third relates to how simulation-based learning activities afford a crucial pedagogical orientation towards defining what constitutes exemplary professional practice in specific training situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the virtue epistemology literature on epistemic emotions and challenges the individualist, unworldly account of epistemic emotions. It argues that epistemic emotions can be truth-motivating if embedded in co-inquiry epistemic cultures, namely virtuous epistemic cultures that valorise participatory processes of inquiry as truth-conducive. Co-inquiry epistemic cultures are seen as playing a constitutive role in shaping, developing, and regulating epistemic emotions. Using key references to classical Pragmatism, the paper describes the bridge between epistemic emotions and co-inquiry culture in terms of habits of co-inquiry that act as the scaffolding of epistemic emotions. The result is a context-sensitive and practice-oriented approach to epistemic emotions that conceives of those emotions as being shaped by co-inquiry epistemic cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global sustainability challenges transcend disciplines and, therefore, demand interdisciplinary approaches that are characterized by cross-disciplinary collaboration and integration across disciplines. In accordance with this need for interdisciplinary approaches, sustainability professionals have been reported to require interdisciplinary competencies. Although the necessity of interdisciplinary competencies is generally agreed upon, and there has been extensive research to understand competencies for interdisciplinarity, there is still no comprehensive understanding of how individual competencies shape the ability to integrate knowledge across disciplines. Therefore, based on empirical research and literature review, we propose a novel framework to understand competencies for interdisciplinarity. The empirical data were collected through written reflection and interviews with 19 students in the context of an interdisciplinary master's course. We describe four typical behaviours—naïve, assertive, accommodating, and integrative. Based on these behavioural typologies, we define two sets of competencies that collaborators require to engage in interdisciplinary knowledge integration: Epistemic Stability (ES) and Epistemic Adaptability (EA). ES competencies are the competencies to contribute one's own academic knowledge, such as theoretical and methodological grounding in one's own field and confidence, and EA competencies are the competencies to engage with academic knowledge contributed by others, such as curiosity, openness and communicative skills. Our findings show that interdisciplinary knowledge integration requires ES and EA competencies. Our framework for interdisciplinary competencies offers insights for revising and designing more interventions to prepare (future) professionals for interdisciplinary work on sustainability issues, providing insights on criteria for assessment, management, and training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an in-depth analysis of epistemic cultures in conflict by exemplifying the epistemic conflict between high energy physics (HEP) and astronomy which emerged after the discovery of 'dark energy' and the accelerating expansion of the universe. It suggests a theoretical framework combining Knorr-Cetina's concept of epistemic cultures with Whitley's theory of dependencies in the sciences system, which explains that epistemic conflicts occur, if the strategic and functional dependency of two incommensurable epistemic cultures is suddenly growing. The pre-history of the conflict is discussed on a micro-level for the two research groups involved in the breakthrough. The analysis of the consequent epistemic conflict on a macro-level reveals that it embraces the preferred epistemic strategy, the collaboration style, the instrumental concepts and the question how social legitimacy can be generated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have enumerated unique challenges to collaborative interdisciplinary research, many of which evade prescriptive solutions. Some of these challenges can be understood as 'essential tensions,' necessary and persistent contradictory imperatives in the scientific process. Drawing from interviews with internationally renowned interdisciplinary environment-society research center leaders primarily located in United States academic institutions, we identified three hierarchical tensions in collaborative interdisciplinary research: (1) an epistemic tension between knowledge generation processes that blend multiple approaches into one unified intellectual perspective versus pluralistic processes that maintain multiple, discrete intellectual perspectives, (2) a structural tension between organizations that provide stability to persist and build unified knowledge, while maintaining the flexibility to experiment with novel organizational arrangements that foster innovation, and (3) 'affective' tensions for individual researchers between the security of working within cohesive research communities versus attraction to the creative challenges in new intellectual communities. Our results indicate that these tensions are interdependent, similar to previous observations that disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge productions are linked. Rather than attempt to resolve tensions between dueling directives, leaders of interdisciplinary research centers can manage essential tensions with purpose through process-oriented and self-reflective management of the unique epistemic culture of the research centers they lead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the difference between the structures of risk policies and the hybrid regimes of knowledge regarding genetically modified organisms (GMO). It considers that the debates in risk policy pertaining to such organisms are dependent on the unresolved conflicts around scientific strategies and structures of evidence among epistemic cultures. It concludes that different epistemic cultures are likely to be characterized through their strategies of evidence-making.