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Complex multidisciplinary problem solving

Teaching and learning for knowledgeable action and innovation: An epistemic fluency perspective

What does it take to be a productive member of a multidisciplinary team working on a complex problem? How do people get better at these things? How can researchers get deeper insight in these valued capacities; and how can teachers help students develop them?

Centre for Research on Learning and Innovation
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Main content

Working on real world problems usually requires the combination of different kinds of specialised and context dependent knowledge, as well as different ways of knowing. People who are flexible and adept with respect to different ways of knowing about the world can be said to possess epistemic fluency.

Drawing upon and extending the notion of epistemic fluency, in this research seminar, I will present some key ideas that we developed studying how university teachers teach and students learn complex professional knowledge and skills. Our account combines grounded and enacted cognition with socio-material perspectives of human knowing and focus on capacities that underpin knowledgeable action and innovative professional work. In this seminar, I will discuss critical roles of grounded conceptual knowledge, ability to embrace professional materially-grounded ways of knowing and students’ capacities to construct their epistemic environments.

Speaker Bio

Lina Markauskaite is an associate professor at the University of Sydney and the deputy director of the Centre for Research on Learning and Innovation (CRLI). Her primary research area is concerned with understanding the nature of capabilities involved in complex (inter-)professional knowledge work and learning. Her work combines grounded, enacted cognition and sociomaterial views of knowledge and knowing and look at professional learning from, so called, “epistemic fluency” perspective.

This theoretical account is elaborated in the co-authored book “Epistemic fluency and professional education: innovation, knowledgeable action and actionable knowledge” (2016, Springer, co-authored with Peter Goodyear). Lina’s second research area is emerging interdisciplinary research methods. Her main work includes the coedited book “Methodological Choice and Design: Scholarship, Policy and Practice in Social and Educational Research” (2011, Springer, coedited with Peter Freebody and Jude Irwin) and the special issue of the British Journal of Educational Technology “e-Research for Education: Applied, Methodological and Critical Perspectives” (2014, co-edited with Peter Reimann).