Developing Epistemic Empathy: Shifting Approaches to NOS Teaching

Abstract

Despite decades of research, NOS is still rarely explicitly and accurately taught in K-12 schools (Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2023). To improve NOS teaching at the K-12 level, it is important for teacher educators and researchers to experience, understand, and acknowledge the daily work of teachers and how that influences teaching NOS in the classroom. In this paper, we describe how teacher educators and researchers can develop greater epistemic empathy – an understanding and appreciation of the cognitive and emotional experiences of teaching NOS – through participating in experiences that resemble those of the preservice and inservice K-12 teachers they work with. We illustrate this idea through a discussion of lessons learned through a self-study of the first author’s experience teaching NOS in a middle school classroom. Keywords: nature of science, teacher education, epistemic empathy