http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6000-0967
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Abstract
To discuss reflexive practice in relation to epistemic cognition, we posit informed reflexivity as an epistemic virtue that is informed by its particular context and purposes of knowing and action and promotes use of reliable processes to achieve epistemic aims. It involves reasoning about social relationships in which a person is embedded when acting in a specific kind of context—whether academic or real-world—that requires construction, evaluation, and application of knowledge. Informed reflexivity is the learned disposition to reason about one's knowledge-related actions, entailing context-specific epistemic characteristics. It involves an intentional stance about the need to reason about oneself and the context. Discussions of two disciplinary competencies (science and history) and two cross-disciplinary competencies (critical thinking and writing) illustrate how epistemically competent practices instantiate informed reflexivity. Promoting informed reflexivity as an epistemic virtue might dispose students toward reliable processes of knowing and making epistemically informed resolved action appropriate to the context.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article was initiated by a working group attending the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction Advanced Study Colloquium “Changing Personal Epistemologies in Teaching and Teacher Education: A Focus on Reflection and Reflexivity” in August 2015, Limassol, Cyprus.
FUNDING
The colloquium was funded by the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction.
Notes
1 We distinguish between discipline and domain. We use the word discipline only when we refer to academic disciplines, and we use the word domain to refer to broader areas of knowledge that may not be contained in or informed by a particular academic discipline.
2 This is in line with the argument that when dealing with science-based knowledge claims, individuals may likely not evaluate the truth of the claim directly but may instead make trustworthiness judgments (Hendriks, Kienhues, & Bromme, Citation2016). Such judgments can be made regarding three aspects of a source of science-based information (e.g., a scientist or a scientific institution): the source's expertise, integrity, and benevolence (Hendriks, Kienhues, & Bromme, Citation2015). Such trustworthiness judgments are then reliable strategies of (indirect) knowledge evaluation.