Epistemic Objects and Tools on the School Grounds
Addressing Plant Blindness and Knowledge Construction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21392770 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Maurice M W Cheng (0000-0002-8483-4074, University of Auckland Auckland New Zealand, corresponding author), Bronwen Cowie (0000-0002-7087-5895, University of Waikato Hamilton New Zealand) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 110 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1152-1168 |
| Publication date | 2026-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Science Education (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0036-8326 • E-ISSN: 1098-237X |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/sce.70063 |
| OpenAlex | W7134177387 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 80 |
Plants mediate the supply of energy and matter for all animals, including human beings yet we are faced with “plant blindness” whereby we pay limited attention to and accord little value to plants. Plant blindness is evident in school curricula whereby students have limited opportunities to learn about plants. This paper proposes and illustrates how students' understanding and awareness of plants might be enhanced by building connections with the native kōwhai trees in their school grounds as epistemic objects and epistemic tools. Kōwhai are endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand and play a significant role in Māori cultural knowledge and the local environment. In our study, we examined how a primary school teacher created opportunities for a class of 22 Year 5–6 students (age 8–10 years) to enhance their plant awareness. Through audio‐recording, field notes, photographs and student work, and interviews with the teacher, we report our findings as vignettes that reconstruct key aspects of the 1‐week teaching and learning sequence. Tasked with creating infographics about the kōwhai for school visitors, students engaged in various observation activities by iteratively visiting the kōwhai trees in situ and specimens from them in the classroom. We argue that the features and location of the trees on the school grounds, along with the learning community the teacher created, transformed the kōwhai trees and the infographic design into objects of inquiry (epistemic objects) and tools for knowledge construction (epistemic tools) which supported an increase in student plant awareness
Ambiguity · Class (philosophy) · Curriculum · Energy (signal processing) · Infographic · Outdoor education · Perspective (graphical) · Science education · Value (mathematics) · Animal and Plant Science Education · Environmental Education and Sustainability · Science Education and Pedagogy
An Epistemology of the Concrete
Learning to Feel Like a Scientist
Plant awareness disparity
“Look It, This is how You Know
Opening up curricula to redistribute epistemic agency
Sense of place in the practice and assessment of place‐based science teaching
Collectively produced epistemic objects and their necessary incompleteness for professional learning on a large-scale online platform
Reconfiguring science education through caring human inquiry and design with pets
Greening for academic achievement
Emotional configurations in STEM classrooms
Emotion, place, and practice
Characterizing adaptive teaching expertise
Missed opportunities for observation‐based ecology in the Next Generation Science Standards
Principles of Collaborative Education Research With Stakeholders
Science teachers' sensemaking of the use of epistemic tools to scaffold students' knowledge (re)construction in classrooms
Prioritizing emotion objects in making sense of student learning of socioscientific issues
A national research agenda supporting green schoolyard development and equitable access to nature
Towards a model of plant awareness in education
Feedback from research participants
Stewardship and beyond? Young people’s lived experience of conservation activities in school grounds
What’s so special about model organisms
I Feel Like a Real Chemist Right Now
Knowledge Practices in Design
The Best of Both Worlds
Place-responsive pedagogy
Cultural processes in science education
Exploring the Use of Vignettes
Exhibiting Epistemic Objects
Collecting Nature
Epistemic Cultures
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |