Framing has been much more widely researched within science education. What those science educators have found is that frames can be manipulated, students respond to such framings, and teachers can support students to engage in sense making, at least at an individual level. They
also considered teachers’ framings and how to support changes in them. Most of their work has focused on two particular kinds of framing: expansive and epistemological.
Berland and Hammer (2012a) applied epistemological framing to examine the ways in which a teacher influenced students’ engagement in scientific argumentation. As keeps coming up in this review, they were contrasting ‘doing the lesson’ framings with more discipline-oriented framings of argumentation that were intended for the purpose of convincing another person or group with support for claims. They provided detailed analyses of two different instructional sessions that were representations of what normally happened in the class. They contrasted the two sessions by terming one an idea-sharing session and the other an argumentative one. Within the idea-sharing session, the students were not engaging with one another’s ideas and their contributions were to the teacher instead of to one another. The argumentative discussion, however, involved students talking directly to one another and critiquing one another’s contributions – arguing with them. They attributed subtle differences in the two interactions to students’ and the teacher’s framing of it. That a student addressed another student’s challenge to one of his claims indicated that the student who made the initial argument expected to defend it to more than just the teacher. In addition, the teacher’s physical location during the argumentative discussion was different. He was seated behind the students so that they could address one another instead of looking to him. He also gave the student presenter a yardstick to identify him/her as the one in charge. Broadly what Berland and Hammer’s (2012a) work did was point out specific aspects of the teacher’s and students’ interactions that were a difference in framing. They attributed differences in framing to subtle moves by the teacher.
Various other researchers have studied epistemological framing in different settings (i.e., Andrade, Delandshere & Danish, 2016; Haglund, Jeppsson, Hedberg & Schonborn, 2015; Louca,
Elby, Hammer, Kagey, 2004). One way that Russ, Lee & B. Sherin (2012) applied epistemological framing was to cognitive clinical interviews. Interested in understanding how students interpreted such interactions, and thus the resultant conclusions researchers draw from the interviews, these researchers used epistemological framing as a way of interpreting students’ behaviors in the interaction. Different from other researchers’ works noted thus far with respect to framing, Russ et al. (2012) relied on clustered behaviors to make determinations about the ways in which students were framing the interviews. Though they did not call it such, they alluded to students’ framings in the interviews as almost a test-taking scenario as opposed to a knowledge-seeking one in which the students would try to reason through the question to come to an answer. These distinctions seemed similar to ‘doing the lesson’ as opposed to other more productive framings of the interaction. They went beyond identifying the ways in which students were framing the interviews to study the ways in which the interviewer could influence students’ framings. Ultimately, they found that particular talk moves were supportive of invoking certain desired frames and even maintaining desired frames once they were in place.
Their work further contributed to the idea that frames can be manipulated in interaction. Though the setting was not a classroom, it still demonstrated the ways in which interactions could cue particular framings for participants. They suggested that more work needs to be done to determine the ways in which desirable frames can be initiated and stabilized so that information gleaned in interactions can align more closely with its aims – sense making in the case of mathematics education.
Finally, a different take on epistemological framing was evident in Watkins, Coffey, Maskiewicz and Hammer’s (2017) study of teachers’ epistemological framings in summer professional development. What they were trying to understand was not only teachers’
epistemological framings within certain summer professional development activities, but how their epistemological stances might change over time. While teachers’ framings were not the target of their study, they did use the analytic lens to help reveal the ways in which some teachers demonstrated more productive epistemologies in relation to the act of engaging in ‘doing science’ (Jiménez-Aleixandre et al., 2000). In describing some more favorable interactions with the activities during the summer professional development, the researchers pointed out that the teachers were resolving scientific challenges in ways similar to what they would do if they were in a different, non-educational setting. They referred to such interactions as sense-making that might occur at home.
Their work addressed a different aspect related to a teacher’s work of framing – their own epistemological stances toward the discipline. What they encountered with teachers in a summer professional development was that their epistemological framings were similar to that of ‘doing the lesson.’ They demonstrated an expectation that the professional development providers would be the authority over the scientific content and would share it with them. That is, that the professional development would be a teacher-centered (teacher here meaning professional development provider) endeavor as opposed a learner-centered one (with the learners in this case being classroom teachers engaged in professional development). Their work was similar to Heyd- Metzuyanim et al.’s (2018) study in that both found that the teachers’ framings of the interaction in relation to the discipline had implications for how they framed the activity in which they were engaging.