There is a pressing need to prepare STEM teachers to be more open and responsive to students diverse ideas, experiences, and knowledge, and to design instruction in ways that leverage those as resources and assets within instruction. My project addresses this need by exploring how teachers’ epistemic empathy—their attunement to and appreciation of students’ intellectual and emotional experiences within epistemic work—might foster responsiveness in the classroom. Questions guiding my work include: How can epistemic empathy be cultivated in teacher education? How does it shape teachers’ understanding of their roles, goals, and priorities as science or mathematics teachers? And how does it shape teachers’ responsiveness to student thinking and emotions during instruction?

The project draws on research on responsive teaching which asserts that learners’ diverse experiences and funds of knowledge are resources for engaging in disciplinary ways of thinking. This stance challenges deficit narratives that position students—particularly those from historically marginalized groups—as lacking. My project examines how cultivating teachers’ epistemic empathy can promote such an asset-based stance that supports teachers’ responsiveness to students’ linguistic, emotional, cultural, and experiential knowledge in moments of instruction. Using a design-based approach, the research team designs and implements educative experiences aimed at cultivating teachers’ epistemic empathy. These experiences include: discussions of readings that feature learners’ ways of thinking beyond what is traditionally viewed as “scientific” or “mathematical”; engaging in science and mathematics investigations to interrogate one’s own learning and emotions in those disciplines; analyzing videos and artifacts of student thinking to support teachers’ facility with interpreting student ideas and a stance of humility and curiosity towards all students as sensemakers; and interacting with students and analyzing those interactions to expand teachers’ attention to learners’ diverse sense-making repertoires, and to surface and problematize biases that manifest in moments on instruction.