Paper Title
Building Agency in an Epistemic Community

Abstract
The study explores the process by which students build epistemic agency and examines the role of epistemic tools in social mediations. 299 pupils participated in this study. Using 360 VR video cameras, 655 hours of video were recorded and 120 hours were fully transcribed. Findings indicate that the interplay lead students to negotiate some important epistemic criteria. This includes what counts as scientific evidence, why the same data and reasoning can support or result in different conclusions, and what experimental conditions are required to test ideas scientifically. The analysis suggests that having a shared epistemic goal that emerges out of a need to accommodate material resistance is a driving force shaping students’ epistemic activity. Our findings have implications for designing learning environments in which pupils are situated to pursue step-wise epistemic goals and building agency. Index Terms - About Four Key Words or Phrases in Alphabetical Order, Separated by Commas.