The landscape of contemporary epistemology has significantly diversified in the past 30 years, shaped in large part by two complementary movements: virtue and social epistemology. This diversification provides an apt theoretical context for the epistemology of education. No longer concerned exclusively with the formal analysis of knowledge, epistemologists have turned their attention towards individuals as knowers, and the social contexts in which epistemic goods such as knowledge and understanding are acquired and exchanged. As such, the concerns of epistemology have once (...) again aligned with questions lying at the heart of the philosophy of education regarding the nature, aims and practice of education. Employing the conceptual tools and frameworks of the contemporary field, these questions are addressed by both epistemologists and education theorists in the emerging epistemology of education literature. (shrink)

Although constructivist discussions in the classroom are often treated as if they were all of the same kind, in this paper I argue that there are subtle but important distinctions that need to be made. An analysis of these distinctions shows that there is a continuum of different constructivist discussions. At one extreme are teacher-directed discussions where students are led to construct the ‘correct’ understanding of a pre-decided conclusion; at the other extreme are unstructured discussions where students are free to (...) construct any understanding. While there are many positions on the continuum, the middle ground is occupied by discussions that find a balance between teacher-control and student-independence, and between having set-answers and a free-for-all. I argue that the Community of Inquiry is a useful conception of constructivist discussions in this middle ground. (shrink)