Playful stances for developing pre-service teachers’ epistemic cognition: Addressing cognitive, emotional, and identity complexities of epistemic change through play

Background
Teachers who show more developed epistemic cognition teach better and promote more and better learning in their students. Studies indicate that teacher training impacts little on student teachers’ epistemic cognition development. One of the difficulties of epistemic cognition interventions is that, beyond the conceptual level, epistemic change implies identity challenge and emotional distress. Both benefit from a playful setting to be managed. We designed and implemented a university course as a socio-constructivist playful training experience. In a previous study, using growth curve analysis, we showed that this course promoted epistemic cognition development in student teachers.

Aims
In this study we analyzed the experience of the course participants to characterize the lived process of change and to propose ways of understanding the relationship between a game-based course and epistemic change.

Participants
Twenty-five female student teachers in their second, third, or fourth year of study participated in the study.

Methods
Both small and whole group interactions from 15 training sessions, and 8 individual interviews after the course, were recorded and qualitatively analyzed to explore the students’ experiences.

Results
The analysis allows us to acknowledge changes in the students’ attitudes towards the course, their roles in the classroom, and conceptual understandings that we organized in four phases from initial bewilderment and resistance, to the active and applied integration of knowledge.

Conclusions
We discuss how different levels and layers of playfulness can sustain the difficulties student teachers’ face during their epistemic change process.