Building Trust: Supporting Vulnerability for Doing Science in School

Science education’s emphasis on supporting students’ participation in science knowledge-building practices, often through talk and collaboration, have become increasingly important goals for learning. But this emphasis creates both social and epistemic risks for students: the process of building knowledge requires continually identifying and wrestling with uncertainty, and building knowledge collectively requires making that uncertainty public. In this study, I investigate how a classroom community shifted to become a place where students regularly participated in risky science knowledge-building. I theorize that this shift occurred through a process of trust-building, and utilize this case to further elucidate the phenomenon of trust-building in the context of science learning.