‘Is it mine, is it yours? It is ours.’ Shared epistemic agency in collaborative research activities

Abstract: Knowledge creation entails collaborative learning processes, involving groups of students that act collaboratively in order to create new knowledge. In this study, we discuss shared epistemic agency as one of the main concepts capturing the process and evolution of collaboratively creating knowledge. A multiple-method approach was employed when analyzing the data collected from a research module in higher education. Central in these analyses was the manner in which shared epistemic agency was instantiated during collaborative students ’ work on their shared knowledge objects, the research reports. A number of activities characterizing shared epistemic agency during collaborative work on shared knowledge objects are identified and described. These results feed back into new insights on how shared epistemic agency is enacted in this specific context, and into a finetuning of our description of the concept itself