The epistemological framing of a discipline: Writing science in universityoceanography

The purpose of this paper is to examine how instruction in scientific writi ng in a university oceanography course communicated epistemological positio ns of this discipline. Drawing from sociological and anthropological studie s of scientific communities, this study uses an ethnographic perspective to explore how teachers and students came to define particular views of disci plinary knowledge through the everyday practices associated with teaching a nd learning oceanography. Writing in a scientific genre was supported by in teractive CD-ROM which allowed students to access data representations from geological databases. In our analysis of the spoken and written discourse of the members of this course, we identified epistemological issues such as uses of evidence, role of expertise, relevance of point of view, and limit s to the authority of disciplinary inquiry. Implications for college scienc e teaching are drawn. (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.