Training scenes: Taking science studies to the classroom

Abstract

Academic training, especially at the undergraduate level, is a marginal topic in science studies today. Scientific practices have commonly been approached through studies of research contexts—most visibly, the lab—and only sporadically through studies of the classroom or other teaching contexts. In this article, we draw attention to the pivotal role that academic training plays in the formation and reproduction of thought collectives. Such training, in shaping what students think about their field and what they understand as proper ways of doing science, is an important site of what we call epistemological enculturation. Based on a comprehensive literature review, we make several suggestions on how epistemological enculturation can be studied at the level of training scenes, a concept we develop in the article. This includes a discussion of the methodological as well as theoretical difficulties that occur when analysing academic training in action.

How are university students introduced to the tools and theories within their field of study? What do they learn about science and the importance of scientific knowledge in general? How do lecturers make epistemological concepts and values accessible in the classroom? How are these concepts and values transformed in the hands (and minds) of students? What are the historical layers that undergird contemporary forms of academic training? That is: How strongly are epistemological concepts and values embedded in stabilized practices that generations of undergraduates have had to deal with, such as acquiring statistical tools, handling instruments in lab courses, retrieving information from library sources, conducting observations during fieldwork, or taking a critical stance towards a text?

Such questions arise if we assume that there is more happening in academic training than the teaching and learning of subject matter. How to think and act scientifically relates to long-standing beliefs and practices. For example, hand drawing techniques, which continue to enjoy a high status in botany and zoology training (Kastenhofer, 2004; Schulze, 2004, pp. 113–116), or textbooks in sociology, which so often convey a standard model of research oriented towards logical empiricism (Lynch & Bogen, 1997, pp. 488–489), can be understood as materializations of epistemological concepts and values that have become conventional as part of a study area’s identity, whilst their original justifications may have been forgotten. Studying a particular subject at the university thus necessitates becoming habituated, intellectually and manually, to the customs and conventions of a Fleckian thought collective. As Fleck (1935/79, p. 104) writes: ‘Every didactic introduction is … literally a “leading into” or a gentle constraint’. Fleck conceived of academic training as a subtle process of enculturation by which students get used to the dogmatic ways of thinking and acting prevalent in their field of study. But what exactly does growing into a thought collective entail for today’s students—and for their lecturers? And which aspects of academic training have been taken up in the recent history of science studies?

Based on an extensive literature review, this article advocates a renewed perspective on the epistemological enculturation of university students. The characteristics of their scientific upbringing have largely been the domain of higher education research. Contributions from this field often use standardized tools such as questionnaires to present quantifiable insights into cohorts of students. Other studies have a normative bias: The assumption goes that students’ ideas about science should be of a certain nature and that potentially deficient ideas can be corrected, while there is limited interest in how these ideas came about and how academic training can be observed through fieldwork.

The practice-oriented, ethnographic approaches of science studies could provide countervailing accounts, but academic training, especially at the undergraduate level, has remained a marginal object of study. Science studies has been more concerned with ‘fully formed’ scientists (Bulpin & Molyneux-Hodgson, 2013, p. 92), their knowledge production, and their manifold entanglements with culture and society. In ‘classic stories of STS’, Mody and Kaiser (2008, p. 378) note, the actors’ roles ‘as teachers and/or students are subordinated to (or invisible beside) their roles as researchers’. While a small number of cases explore the everyday practices of students, a subfield called ‘classroom studies’ (analogous to lab studies) is not yet to be found in science studies handbooks.

How scientists think and act in their field of research, what they consider to be real science, how they assess the importance of their field of study, and how they understand the cultural relevance of scientific findings remains connected to the experiences these scientists had when they were students. A closer look into processes of epistemological enculturation helps understand how the ingrained ways in which scientists conceive of their epistemic objects, raise questions, perform manual activities, or deploy theories and methods, first emerge.

Beyond that, the consequences of epistemological enculturation transcend the academic context, since the great majority of university graduates are employed outside of professional science, ¹ often in decision-making roles at companies, administrations, museums, foundations, government agencies or NGOs. Drawing from a background in the humanities, the social or the natural sciences, they work out programmes, plan exhibitions, argue for this or that measure on the basis of scientific evidence, or engage in dialogue with citizens, hence playing a pivotal role in translating scientific work into society.

In the first part of this article, we provide a comprehensive review of the literature, which led us into a variety of research contexts. ² With the aim of highlighting a range of significant contributions and currents regardless of disciplinary boundaries, we devote attention to the details of existing studies from science studies on the one hand, and sociology, cultural anthropology, history of science, education science, and higher education research on the other. In the second part of the article, we discuss a number of theoretical questions triggered by the literature review and then introduce the training scene as a concept to consider when observing epistemological enculturation in situ.

The term training scene designates a particular teaching situation (e.g. an exercise in a laboratory course) in which various elements of academic training coalesce, from the individuals involved to their subject matter to the theories, tools and materials used. We use epistemological enculturation, in turn, as an umbrella term under which the various instances of teaching and learning described in this paper might fit. With Roth (2001, p. 20), the result of enculturation can be understood as ‘a set of dispositions that structure perceptions of and actions toward the world, but are themselves structured by the experience in the world’. If this world is the university with its diverse study areas, enculturation is inherently epistemological. It is instigated by the transmission of characteristic ways in which a field defines its epistemic objects, makes sense of phenomena, reflects upon its methodologies, writes about its findings, as well as all other epistemologically grounded practices a novice is supposed to acquire in order to become a capable member of that field. These practices unfold over time and are dependent on the local circumstances of academic training, making epistemological enculturation a most intricate object of inquiry.

In addition to issues of observation, the problem of how to deal with the inconspicuousness, the scatteredness and the temporality of enculturation processes shall be of particular importance in this paper. Our interest here is not in presenting a full-fledged case study. Instead, we turn the literature into an empirical material in its own right in the following sections and then identify desiderata, make conceptual suggestions, and highlight methodological challenges.

Studies of academic training: a review

‘Scientists are not born, they are made.’ This dictum of Kaiser (2005b, p. 1) is compelling, but science studies has been hesitant to delve into the concrete procedures and epistemological peculiarities of academic training. Instead, ever since the early laboratory studies (Collins, 1985; Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Latour & Woolgar, 1979/86; Lynch, 1985) the focus has been on research practice and the process of constructing knowledge, while the teaching practice as it takes place every day in lecture halls and classrooms remained an ‘important, but underemphasized ingredient in many STS narratives’ (Mody & Kaiser, 2008, p. 378). As Bulpin and Molyneux-Hodgson (2013, p. 92) affirmed, ‘social studies of science have paid insufficient attention to the training—or disciplining—processes that create … knowledge-producing communities.’

Teaching scientists are rarely observed in the classroom, which is why insights into the interplay between lecturers, students, the study area and the practical circumstances of teaching are lacking: What kinds of pedagogical logic are exercised in today’s academic training? In what ways do individual ‘epistemic communities’ (Bulpin & Molyneux-Hodgson, 2013, pp. 96, 102) vary in their ways and means of training students? The literature offers only cursory insight into the epistemological concepts and values imparted during instruction in addition to, and wrapped within, the syllabus: Which tools do lecturers use to teach their students how to think and act according to the—written or unwritten—rules of their study area? How exactly does the ‘enculturation’ (Roth, 2001, p. 20f) of students into a thought collective come about?

Foundational works

An inspiring point of departure for our endeavour is Louis Althusser’s consideration of the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ of scientists. Althusser uses this term to designate how widely shared views about a certain science—and science in its entirety—are constructed, what they are based on, and what their epistemological requirements are. Spontaneous philosophy is not the ‘philosophy of the philosophers’ (Althusser, 1974/90, p. 114), but that of the scientific practitioner. It covers ‘the ideas (conscious or unconscious) that scientists have of the scientific practice of the sciences and of “Science”’ (Althusser, 1974/90, p. 132). As Macherey (2009, p. 20) puts it, even the simplest scientific activities are ‘always-already’ pervaded by spontaneous philosophies. As ‘spontaneous,’ that is, obvious ideas which are influential although they have not been structured into a coherent system of thought, they feed into both research and teaching contexts. As Althusser (1974/90, p. 94) states, ‘All science teaching, whether it wants to or not, conveys an ideology of science and of its findings’. In other words, science teaching conveys attitudes and behaviours that are not recognized as attitudes and behaviours.

Notwithstanding some writings in historical epistemology that engage with Althusser’s ideas (notably Macherey, 2009; Rheinberger, 1976; Tulatz, 2018), the concept of spontaneous philosophies has had very little resonance in science studies up until today, though Althusser’s way of making sense of science resembles the foundational works by Kuhn (1962) and Fleck (1935/79). What Kuhn calls a ‘paradigm’ is akin to a spontaneous philosophy, since (a) the paradigm ‘takes silent and invisible forms in the “normal” course of scientific practice’ (Althusser, 1974/90, p. 116), and (b) the paradigm provides a stable theoretical background that guides the way practitioners look at their field. For Kuhn this theoretical background consists of a basic set of notions, presumptions, recognized theories and ideas of adequate approaches to which actors refer within a certain subject area. In central passages of Structure, Kuhn (1962, pp. 136–143, 165–167, 187–191) links the concept of the paradigm directly to academic training: On the basis of exemplary problems reduced to the mode of ‘normal science’—‘problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions’ (Kuhn, 1962, p. 37)—students are familiarized with the ways of thinking in their study area. As Barnes (1982, pp. 18–20) notes in his comments on Kuhn, this familiarization happens not so much through ‘abstract verbal presentations of concepts, definitions, rules and laws’ as by means of unabating exercises peppered with ‘authority’.

There is no romanticism whatsoever in Kuhn’s (1963, p. 351) depiction of scientific education: ‘Though scientific development is particularly productive of consequential novelties, scientific education remains a relatively dogmatic initiation into a pre-established problem-solving tradition that the student is neither invited nor equipped to evaluate.’ It is in passing that he hints at ‘the many significant yet minor differences between the various sciences’ (Kuhn, 1959/77, p. 228) as well as between the American and other academic systems (Kuhn, 1963, p. 350), while maintaining his claim that there is an unalloyed predilection for ‘convergent thought’ (Kuhn, 1959/77, p. 228), a situation which also manifests itself in the status that textbooks possess in the sciences. According to Kuhn, science is a textbookish kind of thing (our term, not his), up until the stage of graduation. What comes before that stage exhibits traits of ‘a narrow and rigid education, probably more so than any other except perhaps in orthodox theology’ (Kuhn, 1962, p. 137). Here, Kuhn’s characterization is close to Fleck’s (1935/79, p. 102), who—based on textbooks and personal experience—emphasizes how uncompromising the instruction in a thought style is: ‘the Holy Ghost as it were descends upon the novice who will now be able to see what has hitherto been invisible to him.’ Like spontaneous philosophies, thought styles are not ephemeral world views, but shape the epistemic objects and how they have to be investigated in a certain field.

References to thought styles and paradigms became customary in numerous science studies monographs that demonstrated the local contingencies and the diversity of scientific forms of thinking and doing, yet academic training and the emergence of subject-specific teaching cultures were of little interest. When the sciences were addressed as epistemic cultures (Knorr-Cetina, 1999) that were to function as ‘machineries of knowledge production’, this was done mostly with reference to the research side, but not to the preservation and consolidation of these cultures during teaching. Among the canonical laboratory studies, only Traweek’s (1988) work on high-energy physics (p. 7) analyses in depth how a ‘system of knowledge, skills, and beliefs’ is passed on from experienced researchers to beginners. Based on her research at two laboratories in California and Japan, Traweek (1988, p. 162) examined how newcomers grow into an ‘extreme culture of objectivity: a culture of no culture, which longs passionately for a world without loose ends’. On their way from undergrad studies to postdoc employment they were ingrained with ‘the physicists’ “common sense” world view’ (Traweek, 1988, p. 8), which regulates high-energy physicists’ relationship to each other and to their objects of research (Traweek, 1988, pp. 74–105). In Traweek’s study, that which distinguishes a ‘good high-energy physicist’ is performed through the actors’ everyday activity and thinking. This perspective contrasts to studies that deal in a more abstract manner with free-floating ‘epistemic virtues’ (Van Dongen & Paul, 2017, pp. 1–10) like objectivity (Daston & Galison, 2007) or docility (Bezuidenhout et al., 2019).

Enculturation into thought collectives

Few recent studies have taken up Traweek’s (1988, 2005) perspective on enculturation processes. How ‘enculturation into scientific practices, methodologies and the community of researchers’ takes place ‘has typically been approached from a sociological point of view, but the phenomenon is also important from an epistemological one,’ as Tala (2011, p. 733) states. Based on interviews with doctoral students in nanophysics, Tala describes how they appropriate the epistemological premises of their mentors in the field of computer modelling (Tala, 2011, pp. 741–745). The insight that ‘pragmatic matters are crucial in deciding about epistemological questions’ (Tala, 2011, p. 745) is echoed in studies by Delamont et al. (2000) and Delamont and Atkinson (2001). Similarly relying on interviews, they describe what problems students encounter on the threshold between training and research contexts, such as failures due to the discrepancy between what they have already learned and tried out, on the one hand, and the practical requirements of their projects, on the other. This discrepancy triggers a state of ‘disenchantment’ (Delamont & Atkinson, 2001, p. 104), and non-standardizable approaches become significant: a ‘knowledge … held to be “caught” instead of “taught,” transmitted via personal experience instead of systematic instruction’ (p. 101).

The beginning phase of academic training is out of sight in these studies; an exception is, once again, Traweek (1988, pp. 76–81). Roth and Bowen (1999, 2001) offer nuanced observations of the everyday work of advanced young scholars in ecology, showing how quotidian routines make them familiar with the mode of fieldwork typical for this study area. Roth and Bowen (2001, p. 552) describe improvisation strategies that students apply to generate ‘significant results’, e.g. ‘breaking rules and codes of ethics’ by ‘creating fictitious data’ (Roth & Bowen, 2001, p. 543). Observations like these substantiate the value of approaching the training process through fieldwork: what Roth and Bowen establish based on their interviews and fieldnotes on the training and bodily techniques of ecology students—including training of the eye—cannot be discerned through textbooks or manuals. The studies by Goodwin (1994, 1997) on practicing scientific ways of seeing are also instructive in this regard, showing how strongly the observation of excavation objects in archaeology or the determination of colours in chemistry is based on the formation of a certain type of ‘professional vision’ (Goodwin, 1994, p. 606).

Bulpin and Molyneux-Hodgson highlight the role of training processes on the meso-level of emerging thought collectives. They observe the field of synthetic biology as a paradigmatic case that allows them to grasp ‘the formation, character and maintenance of disciplinary communities’ (Bulpin & Molyneux-Hodgson, 2013, p. 92). During training, ‘norms, practices and values’ (Bulpin & Molyneux-Hodgson, 2013, p. 101) that have yet to become stabilized are negotiated; traditional elements from other biological subfields and new elements from synthetic biology are brought together in courses given by the ‘pioneers’ of the field (Bulpin & Molyneux-Hodgson, 2013, p. 101). A deeper analysis of training processes is seen as a desideratum by Bulpin and Molyneux-Hodgson (2013, p. 102): ‘More systematic analysis of the production of scientists is needed and may in the process reshape our thinking on disciplines.’ In Kastenhofer and Molyneux-Hodgson’s (2021) recent volume, some contributors touch upon ‘the functions that graduate and PhD students fulfill’ (p. 16) as well as upon other issues of academic professionalization—an example being Schönbauer’s (2021) exploration into the educational biographies of biologists. Of its 14 chapters, only one delves into the perspectives of novices: Wylie’s (2021, p. 158) case study examines how undergrad lab assistants, depicted as ‘broadly-educated outsiders’, shape the research culture of engineering labs and ‘provide influential injections of creative and diverse thinking’ (p. 159).

Teaching traditions and textbooks

There are a number of studies from the history of science that, despite differences in the circumstances of academic training today, offer a useful analytical repertoire. That teaching traditions are rooted not only locally, but also mark the shape of research in the long term, was documented by Warwick’s (2003) study of mathematical physics in Cambridge, and by Olesko’s (1991) study of the Königsberg Seminar for Physics. The historical analyses in the enthralling volume Pedagogy and the Practice of Science edited by Kaiser (2005a) demonstrate how disciplinary dynamics and teaching traditions shape each other, and which epistemological imperatives guide the training of scientists. Among these, Gusterson (2005) and Mody (2005) elaborate on the connection between training in the natural sciences and the development of the laboratory apparatus. Kaiser’s (2005c) monograph on the circulation of Feynman diagrams offers an exemplary description of the didactic character of techniques of representation, which, through their propagation, also serve to assemble a thought collective. Likewise with reference to phenomena of circulation, but focusing on the context of research rather than teaching, Kohler (1994) outlines how technical skills and theoretical knowledge are passed on in a subfield of biology, including codes of behaviour and views about what makes a respectable scientist; the last of these he calls ‘moral economies’. Clark (2007), in turn, describes how conceptions of virtue function in the context of teaching from the perspective of university history.

Textbooks have also generated a strong interest in the history of science. On the one hand, they are considered as media conveying information; on the other, they are regarded as documents of the emergence, consolidation or change of disciplinary traditions. Vicedo (2012, pp. 86–87) offers an overview of this work and calls for further research into the role of textbooks ‘in supporting and legitimizing specific tools and procedures to justify knowledge claims.’ It is important to note that as a genre, textbooks, whether historical or contemporary, tend toward normative descriptions of the general principles prevalent in a thought collective—descriptions that may well be formative in the development of spontaneous philosophies, but rarely retain their formal, ordered character when they are put to the test in students’ everyday practices. Showing how textbook norms are adopted by lecturers for teaching, and translated into versions of professional thinking and doing, remains the fieldworker’s task. Lynch and Bogen (1997), Molyneux-Hodgson and Facer (2003), Richardson (2004), Love (2006) and Pahl (2011) provide important starting points for examining the sedimentation of certain notions of science in current textbooks; these insights remain to be corroborated by systematic observations of how these books are used in training scenes today.

Academic socialization

Another area of research examines how students are socialized into certain roles. These studies focus on questions of habitus (commonly conceptualized with Bourdieu, 1990). Campbell (2003) interviewed 28 professors at Canadian universities to investigate how they ‘administer’ their students, for instance regarding the selection of suitable topics for degree theses. He is particularly interested in ‘the variety and complexity of social processes’ (p. 922), which are for the most part equivalent to the professional relationships between teachers and students. Yet how these relationships take shape and materialize in the classroom remains an open question. Campbell (2003, p. 923f) concludes that the analysis of ‘activities related to the design and delivery of undergraduate courses in science’ constitutes a desideratum.

With a similar focus, but from the student perspective, there is Becker et al.’s (1968, p. 13) classic book on the network of relationships between lecturers and students, which is characterized by ‘a relationship of subjection or unilateral authority with the college faculty’ and (even back then) by the college students’ obsession with their ‘grade point average’ (Becker et al., 1968, p. 33). The study is based on fieldwork at the University of Kansas, continuing more comprehensive work by Becker et al. (1961) on medical students at the same university. This previous study, limited to the introductory year of medical school, describes how the students are gradually imprinted with a certain professional ethic, although the authors are only marginally interested in how this ethic is manifested in medical instruction.

Closer to contemporary scientific work is a study by Wylie. Drawing on fieldwork in an engineering lab in the US, she is interested in the kinds of stories told while students (and researchers) work together at the bench. Wylie (2019, pp. 823–824) listens in on accounts of failure and fiasco, discerning a lab-specific ‘discourse style’ which helps create a ‘sense of belonging’ and affects the rules of interaction within the lab. By means of ‘disaster stories’ (Wylie, 2019, p. 818), technical skills are handed down from more experienced students and scientists to novices, in a subliminal fashion. Experiences of procedures that failed, career plans that didn’t work out, and things that broke—rather than ‘theory failure’—are the topic of these stories (Wylie, 2019, p. 824). Although Wylie does not zoom in on the epistemological facets of everyday lab talk, her study is exemplary in illustrating how small snippets from conversations among a handful of actors can yield unexpected insights into the enculturation of undergrads into a research setting.

Also focusing on the field of engineering, Tonso (2006, 2007) explores how students construct their ‘engineer self’ (Tonso, 2006, p. 274). She outlines how engineer identities are streamlined over the course of training, with exclusionary effects (on female students, among others). Other work by Tonso (1999) joins Cech and Waidzunas (2011), Faulkner (2007), and Weidler-Lewis (2020) in examining how disciplined engineering students are ‘made,’ for instance through a curriculum that maintains a markedly non-queer, heteronormative order. Nespor (1994) explores similar processes in his comparative study on physics and management undergraduates in the US. As these studies meticulously convey, processes of academic training are part of cultural structures and discourses, which can be investigated in terms of gender norms and exclusionary power relations. Just as in the studies by Becker et al. (1961) as well as Becker et al. (1968), the student is conceived as a subject adapting to—or forced into—a milieu; scenes of students acquiring technical and theoretical knowledge then shift into the background.

In the German-language literature, there are several investigations that focus on structural constraints (such as questions of inequal access) of initiation processes into educational institutions (e.g. Friebertshäuser, 1992; Lange-Vester & Sander, 2016; Pfaff-Czarnecka, 2017; Schmitt, 2010). In the ethnomethodological study by Tyagunova (2017) the focus is on forms of interaction between students and lecturers. Everyday events, such as closing lectures, become understandable as a complex social practice (Tyagunova & Greiffenhagen, 2017).

The fascinating papers in the volume Disziplinierungen (Arnold & Fischer, 2004) have a special position within the literature in sociology and cultural anthropology, as these papers deal specifically with the attitudes that students incorporate in order to become ‘recognized members of the disciplinary community’ (Arnold, 2004, p. 18). The objects of study are disciplinary customs, from the adoption of adequate forms of argumentation (Glaser, 2004, pp. 140–149) all the way to the appropriate use of laboratory instruments (Kastenhofer, 2004, pp. 109–119). Although the authors present their insights on a more generalized level, they include instructive individual observations on ‘learning to read’ in introductory courses on literary studies (Glaser, 2004, pp. 135–138), on the use of the blackboard in physics lectures (Erlemann, 2004, pp. 60–65), and on practicing ‘critical ability’ in historiography (Schmid, 2004, p. 169). Is it analytically problematic that some of these observations are made by scholars who themselves belong(ed) to the thought collectives they are dealing with? Does this obscure their insights into the concrete effects of their own practices? It may strike us as romanticising when Arnold (2004, p. 21) notes that successful initiation in a study area can be traced back to dispositions like ‘feeling,’ ‘taste’ or ‘intuition’—that is, dispositions that are difficult to deal with ethnographically, unless they are materialized in training scenes in which skills understood as ‘tacit knowing’ (Polanyi, 1966, p. 4) are made the explicit object of teaching and thus become accessible to fieldwork.

Adjusting the angle from small-scale practices to the big picture of contemporary knowledge production, Sørensen and Traweek (2022) shift attention towards the entrepreneurial tropes at the heart of university management, most prominently that of ‘excellence’. Their effects on faculty and (doctoral) students are examined in a comparative fashion at NTNU in Norway and UCLA, the authors’ own universities. From a ‘frog’s eye point of view’, Sørensen and Traweek (2022, p. 15) turn towards the changing ecologies of academic work, including ‘the relationship between teaching and research, the conduct of collegiality, the local competition for resources, the interaction between professors and university leadership, and the performance of diverse kinds of outreach’ (pp. 18–19). Sørensen and Traweek’s auto-ethnographic book is breathtaking in that it spans multiple decades of observation and does not leave the dark abysses of university life unnoticed.

Conditions of student life and scientific ideals

Overall, processes of socialization and discipline (at least those focusing on the student perspective) are predominantly studied with respect to the institutional and cultural dimensions of academic training, whereas the epistemological practices undergirding them remain underexplored. In that vein, but with an emphasis on university curricula and their diffusion in instruction, Barrier et al. (2019, p. 54) note that there are to date few ethnographically grounded responses to the question of ‘how social logics, organizational forms and epistemic structures are connected.’

Some studies deal with the disciplinary specifics of university teaching and studying with an eye to pedagogy (Becher & Trowler, 1989; Kaartinen-Koutaniemi & Lindblom-Ylänne, 2008; Sin, 2014; Ylijoki, 2000). In works belonging to the field of science education and neighbouring branches of higher education research, an agenda more strongly marked by the educational sciences and didactics is pursued. Much work is devoted to science education in schools. Among them, Rudolph’s (2019, p. 4) insightful book stands out, as it historicizes ideas of ‘the scientific method’ in the US and points to ‘the remarkable plasticity of the image of scientific work as packaged for classroom consumption’.

Turning to university students, some articles focus on the first year of study as an exceptional situation in terms of social life and the psychology of learning (Bargmann et al., 2022; Bijsmans & Schakel, 2018; Gibney et al., 2011). Among the issues they highlight are students’ motivation, coping with stress, efficient learning strategies and general academic success, but the re-orientation of their ideas of science that occur when students move from secondary school to university remains underexamined. While some studies assess whether and how scientific literacy can be achieved (for a review: Roberts & Bybee, 2014) or look into ‘practical epistemologies’ (Sandoval, 2005, p. 648) predominantly at the high school and college level, other authors investigate how university students define the ‘nature of science’ in engineering, physics, or the geosciences (Kalman, 2010; Nadelson & Viskupic, 2018; Salter & Atkins, 2014). Some studies also propose educational models for conveying basic philosophical tenets or test ‘didactical interventions’ (Teixeira et al., 2012) to enrich understanding regarded as deficient.

This is a provisional coup d’œil on a vast number of investigations, which are typically based on standardized forms of interviews (such as questionnaires) and mostly address the STEM subjects. Quantitative, statistical methods prevail, and many studies target a better understanding of science for the students they analyze. Rarely is this ‘better understanding’ problematized in terms of the requirements specific to a given study area, as Schizas et al. (2016) and Kötter and Hammann (2017) call to mind. Ideals like objectivity or norms like reproducibility tend to be taken for granted, without scrutinizing how delicate it is to define these norms and without pondering how they are linked to contestable premises in the philosophy of science.

Inspiring is Koster and de Regt’s (2020) discussion of implementing scientific norms and ideals into the classroom. They examine the widespread, albeit empirically ‘untenable’ assumption that science ought to be ‘about the facts and nothing but the facts’ (Koster & de Regt, 2020, p. 124), focusing on their own experiences with teaching undergraduate students from the life sciences. The two philosophers show the imponderabilities of deepening their students’ sensitivity about ‘epistemic and non-epistemic values’ (p. 140) that might impinge upon everyday scientific work, such as judgments over ‘which kind of evidence is to be considered as proof for the hypothesis under scrutiny’ (p. 127). While Koster and de Regt are also concerned with deriving pedagogical tools from their reflections, other philosophers of science examine the ‘value-ladenness’ (Carrier, 2013, pp. 2555–2556) of scientific inquiry far beyond the classroom. Hangel and Schickore (2017, p. 785) analyse over 80 interviews with scientists from the natural and social sciences in Germany, the US and UK to find out which ‘methodological ideas, norms, and standards’ they apply to their own work and to the work of other scientists. Notwithstanding their practical implementation, these ideals include methodological transparency, replicability and the adherence to protocols in everyday research (Hangel & Schickore, 2017, pp. 770–778). How these ideals are brought to the classroom by the interviewed scientists is not examined, but this question is raised when Hangel and Schickore (2017, p. 787) conclude by calling for ‘educational strategies’ to train the methodological subtlety of future scientists.

Discussion

As the literature review shows, more than a few studies have been published about students’ epistemological concepts and values. While these studies allow methodologically well-founded insights on micro and macro levels, some of which are quite detailed, the state of research we face is nevertheless highly fragmented. Exchange between science studies and neighbouring fields is rather limited, and the methods and intentions of these studies diverge considerably. Case studies based on participant observation, interviews, or historiographic material contrast with surveys that ask entire cohorts of students about their general views on scientific ideals. The objects of inquiry are disparate, too: Some studies are interested in social dynamics within the academic system, others focus on mechanisms of institutional and disciplinary reproduction, and some deal with curricula or science literacy issues from an applied perspective. Notwithstanding the normative conclusions drawn from some of the findings, several research gaps become apparent.

First, studies on the micro and on the macro level are rarely viewed in relation to each other. Second, when epistemological aspects are examined in detail, little attention is paid to the introductory phase of university studies, such that the thought styles of first-year students remain largely a blank page. Third, it should be kept in mind that epistemological concepts and values are not only imparted in introductory lectures or ‘nature of science’ classes, but are also part of many other teaching situations. Fourth, how epistemological concepts and values become routine in academic training remains understudied. Fifth, the investigation of the epistemological enculturation of students presents particular methodological challenges. Finally, the everyday practices of lecturers, whose tasks in the classroom are not be confused with the tasks they fulfill as researchers, tend to be overlooked altogether, so that insights into the variety of tools that lecturers use to cultivate epistemological concepts and values during their classes are rare. Extending on these points, we put some conceptual and methodological considerations up for discussion in the remainder of the article. The concept of the training scence we propose is not a solution to the problems identified in the literature; rather, it is a starting point for future fieldwork that extends science studies’ fundamental interest in the diversity of scientific practices back into scenes of academic training.

The micro–macro tension

Analysing the epistemological concepts and values which students hold of their study area—and of the sciences as a whole—reveals an inherent tension between studies that look at individual courses or training situations on the micro level, and studies that draw conclusions on the macro level about entire disciplines or entire cohorts of students. This is a problem of perspective prevalent in science studies since the inception of the practice turn. The problem has since been lingering, not least in philosophically inclined takes on scientific practice, as the contributions in Schatzki et al. (2001) and Soler et al. (2014) emphasize. The terms prevalent in this context, such as thought collective (Fleck, 1935/79), paradigm (Kuhn, 1962), forms of life (Collins, 2019), and epistemic culture (Knorr-Cetina, 1999) imply that students are integrated into a homogenous community of thoughts, actions, and values. Studies on the micro level thus suggest, explicitly or implicitly, that their observations are valid for at least a specific field of study (be it German philology in Vienna: Glaser, 2005, or mathematical physics in Cambridge: Warwick, 2003). Whether this assumption is tenable can be ascertained only through comparison, though studies of this kind are currently lacking. Studies on the macro level, in turn, treat their object of investigation as a collective from the outset, occasionally even as a new, emerging collective (Bulpin & Molyneux-Hodgson, 2013). From the perspective of such studies, the formation of and variations between collectives are most interesting, and so the views of individual students about how to think and act scientifically might be deemed irregular or aberrant as soon as the analysis is shifted to the micro level.

This tension recurs in the problem that enculturation into a thought collective, even as this process takes place in lectures, lab practicals, and other formats that are obligatory for all students of a programme, has to be completed by each student individually. This does not become apparent (even as a problematic deviation) if attention is being directed exclusively to the concepts and values shared by a collective. Yet only scholars who subscribe to a ‘sterile educational determinism’ (Warwick & Kaiser, 2006, p. 401) that localizes the entire performative power of academic training toward the lecturers can be confident that the epistemological concepts and values that emerge during academic training are likely to be appropriated by the students in entirely predictable ways. Against the backdrop of (mostly questionnaire-based) studies presupposing a degree of generalizability, or uniformity, of the ideals, values, and norms among student populations, the question should be raised whether a convergence in the outcomes of the enculturation process in a given group of students taking the same programme at the same university can be expected at all. Treating individual differences merely as deviation from a relatively stable inventory of shared concepts and values belies their importance; observing such differences provides valuable indications of aspects that might well be overlooked or hidden when studying the process of enculturation into a thought collective on the macro level.

If we accept that even a single training scene is highly unlikely to produce identical outcomes among students, does this contradict the idea of epistemological enculturation altogether? It does not, since enculturation into a thought style is not synonymous with the factory-like production of uniform minds. As Fleck (1935/79, p. 111) puts it: ‘even the simple communication of an item of knowledge can by no means be compared with the translocation of a rigid body in Euclidean space’. Taken to the classroom, this implies that epistemological values and concepts hardly move unambiguously from a textbook to a seminar discussion or from the slides of a lecture to an exercise during a field trip: This movement requires a lot of work from both the lecturers and the students; it entails remodelling of the subject matter; it is contingent on the students’ previous knowledge; and it may invite resistance, in theoretical and practical terms. Just as there is a difference between a paradigm’s formalised nature and its employment in the course of ‘doing problems’ (Kuhn, 1974/77, pp. 306–308), there is a difference, too, between the purified version of a thought style and its enactment in training scenes. Trying to observe this shift is therefore among the critical errands of examining epistemological enculturation in action.

We can pile up pros and cons for both small-scale analyses that closely follow just a few actors through their daily procedures and large-scale or longitudinal studies that examine, say, the enculturation of students in the agricultural sciences all over France. One way or the other, a comparative perspective, akin to Knorr-Cetina’s (1999) account of two ‘epistemic cultures’ and their disparate laboratory settings, might be a worthwhile pursuit. Contrasting the teaching cultures of variegated fields, from geology to theology, from sociology to hydrology, immerses the observer of academic training into a kaleidoscope of materials and makes her see characteristic differences in the ways and means of academic training across subjects and study programmes. How exactly do ideas of how novices are to be trained diverge? Are there, nonetheless, epistemological bits and pieces that pop up in lecture halls all over the sciences? How diverse are students’ experiences of being introduced epistemologically into their subjects? From which angles can these experiences be compared? Can they be compared at all? As much as there is no unified or universal scientific method, the training of students in even the most classical domains of the natural sciences, such as physics, chemistry, or biology, is hardly identical when it comes to epistemological subtleties: The closer we look, the more nuanced differences we might find. Whilst science studies has excelled in charting the breadths and depths of scientific practices in all strands of research, a collective attempt to ‘diffract’, to recover ‘small but consequential differences’ (Haraway, 1992, p. 318) with regard to some of the most tenacious but ultimately untenable commonplace ideas of how the sciences work has not been brought to bear on teaching contexts so far.

Beginners

The question of how epistemological enculturation occurs in the introductory phase of study programmes is a desideratum in the literature. Measuring what students do during that phase against the ‘typical practices’ (Roth, 2001, p. 20) of scientific research may be misplaced, since the introductory phase of a programme, it can be presumed, does not aim at turning students into capable scientists. Academic training at this stage tends to provide students with the theories and methods common in the field of study, so that they can work on the tasks they are assigned (see, for instance, Traweek, 1988, p. 76). In other words, undergraduate programmes initially do not train scientists but competent members of a thought collective who might or might not become professional scientists.

This does not mean that epistemological concepts and values do not play a particular role at the beginning of any programme of study. The case studies in Arnold and Fischer (2004) show impressively how beginners are confronted in their introductory courses with the expectations, self-conceptions, and approaches of their field of study, into which they are (supposed) to grow through instruction. Such instruction emphasizes how the field of study is different from the way the subject is treated in secondary school. While the difference in physics lies primarily in the mathematical skills required for university study (Erlemann, 2004, p. 60), the introductory courses on biology, history, and literary studies all stress that the study of these subjects requires fundamentally different attitudes and procedures than does previous instruction (Glaser, 2004, p. 130; Kastenhofer, 2004, pp. 97–98; Schmid, 2004, pp. 167–168). Seen in this light, the epistemological enculturation of beginners entails overcoming preconceptions of the field of study (and of academic work in general) that students bring from their previous education as well as from everyday life. According to Lynch and Bogen (1997, p. 486), ‘a list of statements describing how sociological knowledge differs from commonsense belief’ is ‘virtually canonical’ for the introductory sections of sociology textbooks. This underlines that epistemological enculturation can be understood as a process in which existing views are modified, replaced, or expanded by new experiences from the outset. It is improbable that this process comes to an end with the first year of study, and so extensive long-term studies on the micro level about the entire undergraduate period—or even extending across multiple generations of students—would be necessary to obtain a more concrete picture. The work by Sørensen and Traweek (2022), drawing from comparative, autoethnographic material that documents the research and teaching conditions at two universities over more than 25 years, could serve as a model for this.

Where epistemological concepts and values occur: the training scene

With Althusser (1974/90, p. 94) we assume: ‘There is no teaching of pure knowledge (savoir) that is not at the same time a savoir-faire—that is, the definition of a know-how-to-act-in-relation-to-this-knowledge, and to its theoretical and social function.’ Epistemological concepts and values are not an extraneous surplus to the subject matter to be taught. Rather, epistemological enculturation takes place at all times and in the midst of academic training. We propose that typical situations of teaching and learning—for example, explaining the basic terms of a discipline, nurturing critical thinking in seminar discussions, or testing observation and recording skills during a field trip—be conceptualized as training scenes. Inspired by Campe’s (1991) concept of the writing scene, we can tentatively identify six elements interacting in the course of a training scene: the lecturers with their preferences and intentions; the subject matter to be learned, discussed, or experimented upon; the way in which the subject matter is ‘mangled’ (broadly in the sense of Pickering, 1995) by the interactions of lecturers and students in teaching contexts, i.e. during a lecture, seminar, tutorial, excursion, or lab practical; the materials (such as textbooks, slides, specimen, datasets) used in the course of a training scene; the students, in the manner in which they acquire the subject matter and adapt it to their prior knowledge; and the traditions of a study area, including its epistemological concepts and values, which are deeply embedded in didactic practices—for example, in handling measurement instruments during physics practicals or in close reading exercises orchestrated by literary studies scholars.

Teaching formats, course materials, syllabi, hands-on strategies of the lecturers, as well as the prior knowledge and the techniques of the students can be investigated as they interact in the training scene. In what follows we consider what questions then arise and do so with the example of a textbook that helps us elaborate our approach. Gregory Mankiw’s Principles of Economics is an economics textbook widely used in introductory courses. Its first two chapters—under the headings ‘Ten principles of economics’ and ‘Thinking like an economist’—provide a full metascientific canon of economics (Mankiw, 1997/2018, Chapters 1–2). We can study these chapters carefully and become acquainted with a whole string of epistemological considerations, among them the question as to why economists can disagree. We can also examine the structure and sequence of the chapters in Mankiw’s textbook, the layout, the various digital resources linked to the textbook, and the review questions following each chapter. In each chapter, elements occur that are meant to influence which conceptions and values students will link with the discipline of economics. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that the ‘defining power [Deutungsmächtigkeit]’ (Pahl, 2011, p. 369) of the textbook can be easily overestimated: Textbooks are usually not read from A to Z; they are used in class.

In the second chapter of Principles, Mankiw (1997/2018, pp. 22–24) turns to the model as a basic macroeconomic tool. If we imagine this chapter being used in a lecture, several questions arise from the conceptual angle of the training scene. Why do lecturers use Mankiw’s textbook? Do they retain the structure and sequence of the chapter, or do they leave some elements out? How are the basic concepts of economic modelling introduced in class? Do lecturers follow the classic circular-flow diagram used by Mankiw? Do they, like Mankiw, connect the model with an example that is close to the presumed daily experience of the students? Is the model introduced as a whole on a PowerPoint slide and then explained? Or is it gradually assembled in front of the students’ eyes and with their participation? Do students ask questions? How does the lecturer handle these questions? What becomes ‘problematic’ (i.e. highlighted as challenging or contested) about models in the lecture? How do lecturers deal with the ‘worldly’ pre-understanding that students have of models? In what moments do lecturers and students make use of the textbook? Do students discuss the relevant section and the associated test questions in the tutorial afterwards? Do students take notes during the lecture and what, if anything, do they record? How do they—after class and after the tutorial—work individually through the parts of the textbook designated as relevant to the examination? Do they transform the printed text in a ‘text-as-reading’ (Barthes, 1970/89, p. 30) distributed on index cards and colourful post-its?

These are certainly not all aspects to be considered with regard to the training scene Introducing the model as a basic tool. Important for us is to look at the epistemological enculturation of students from a processual perspective that focuses on the interplay of actors, materials, traditions, subject matter and pragmatic constraints that coalesce over the course of a training scene. No element is decisive on its own—neither the selected textbook, nor the lecturer, the student, the teaching method. Going back to the above example: without doubt the very choice of the textbook by the lecturer entails a positioning. And still, what students think of the role of models in economics at the end of the training scene follows from the amalgamation of all elements present in the scene. Speaking of a scene brings the dynamism of classroom situations to the fore. It is a mundane experience that the course of a lecture or of a seminar is not fully plannable. While there are learning objectives, finely tuned didactic maneuvers, and predictable comprehension problems, it remains unforeseeable what will happen when the lecturer asks students what they imagine a model to be, in order to subsequently discuss their everyday understanding of it. The answers may align with the desired response, or they may yield surprising, even disturbing, aspects.

A training scene is like an experiment, which, in the words of Bruno Latour, has the character of an event. As in the example of Pasteur, the academy and the yeast that Latour (1990, p. 66) employs, the lecturers, the students, and the course material all ‘leave their meeting in a different state than which they went into.’ In the analysis of a training scene, it is not only equally important what lecturers and students think and do. What happens in a scene cannot even be understood by focusing only on the lecturer or only on the students, course materials, or modes of presentation. In addition, there are many other actors such as tutors, teaching assistants, technicians, programme managers, deans, and administrative personnel who shape the conditions of the training scene and possibly alter its course.

To be sure, epistemological enculturation is by no means limited to classical formats of instruction. Some very important experiences occur in training scenes outside of the classroom, e.g. during field trips, student reading groups, conversations among students while preparing a presentation, term paper discussions with lecturers, and meetings between students and professors during office hours (for the latter, see Lahm, 2021). Even in situations like these, epistemological concepts and values might surface and, interwoven with a question to be discussed or a task to be solved, guide the actions. Thinking in terms of training scenes thus helps us understand that epistemological enculturation is scattered across a variety of places and ordinary interactions beyond the classroom.

Becoming routine

Epistemological enculturation is a process that continues throughout an entire programme of study. For example, any undergraduate going through ‘stereotypic experiments in highly choreographed laboratory courses’ (Traweek, 1988, p. 76) becomes convinced that a solution will be found for every problem. However, once the first not yet fully solved problem reveals that science has a lot to do with failure, this will likely lead to a ‘reality shock’ (Delamont & Atkinson, 2001, p. 90), changing the student’s epistemological concepts and values. Accordingly, it comes as no surprise that textbooks, programme brochures, syllabi, and other materials purged of the dirty deeds of academic training fail to predict how the the thought styles of students change over the course of their academic biography. Such a change is not necessarily accompanied by the experience of a rupture, or the occurrence of a crisis, as Althusser (1974/90, pp. 109–117) would say. Moments of crisis, in which well-established expectations are disappointed, are primarily characterized by the fact that the reorganization of epistemological concepts and values crosses the threshold of perception. To follow up on the above example: How a student views the role of models in economics at the end of the introductory lecture and what that same student thinks about models at the final year of study probably differs not only in the richness of details. The more the handling of models becomes routine, the more clearly peculiarities will emerge that gradually change the initial understanding.

One way to keep track of such silent transformations is to observe students over the long run, from their first year to the bachelor’s degree. If we assume that the enculturation of students into a thought collective unfolds over time—from the first day of 101 classes to advanced seminars and the composition of a thesis—these processes likely require an analytical commitment over an extended period of time, be it in the mode of cyclically returning to the field or of tagging along with a small group of students from the moment they enter the halls of the university up until graduation—a bold research design. The observer’s audacious chore then is to attune herself to the slow rhythms in which students’ prior knowledge, interactions with fellow students and lecturers, instances of reflection and doubt as well as practical experiences from attended classes are being mangled from one semester to the next. Another way to follow the transformation of epistemological concepts and values during university study is to keep track of individual key elements of a discipline in advanced courses during the programme of study. What students learn in these courses about the importance and function of their discipline’s basic tools can, in turn, be compared with the experiences of the same students during previous classes when these tools were first introduced.

Tracking turning points in enculturation processes is not only a means of overcoming textbookish versions of academic training. This approach also highlights how epistemological concepts and values help in mastering tasks or exercises, and, for advanced students, in the first steps toward genuine scientific research. Epistemological concepts and values constitute tools in the hands of students who creatively adapt them to situations they find challenging, as Roth and Bowen (2001) have shown. The eminent practical importance of epistemological enculturation might best be underlined by once more recalling Althusser to understand epistemological enculturation as a process in which spontaneous philosophies take shape as an agglomeration of instructions on how to think and act in a given field. When students are confronted with a task they cannot easily master, such spontaneous philosophies might help to solve the task, or might just as well turn out to be unsuitable. In the first case, spontaneous philosophies are a bridge that helps students cope with an open situation. They serve as orientation and decision-making aids in unclear situations. In the second case, spontaneous philosophies themselves fall into crisis and may become subject to change as they are confronted with deviating experiences. Either way, epistemological concepts and values are not an extraneous surplus of training but tools routinely used in students’ everyday work on assigned tasks.

Methodological challenges

To conclude this discussion section, one more look at modes of fieldwork. Questionnaires and other standardized research tools have their strengths when the goal is to determine the state of things and make comparisons. Yet these tools are less useful to grasp how epistemological concepts and values develop and transform. Here, observations (participant or not) and qualitative interviews may illuminate the vagaries of training scenes. Think, for example, of observing students getting lost in a lab exercise which, on paper, looks like a clean and orderly array of tasks. Or of talking to lecturers about their experiences in delivering an introductory class with a superb script and finely crafted ideas that must be remodelled due to questions and critique from the audience or a turbulent dialogue with students after class. These situations demonstrate the fragility, the imponderability and the event-like character of academic training, which can be confronted analytically by an immersion into the thick of things, i.e., by asking ad-hoc questions, observing instances of doubt or confusion that no textbook anticipated, and interacting with students or lecturers in the very situations where epistemological enculturation occurs.

But how to proceed? Should observation happen in a participant mode, in the sense of going through all the duties and rites of passage of academic training (including obnoxious tasks like taking exams, writing seminar papers, or soiling one’s shirt during field trips)? Can the observer of training scenes hope to give herself the role of an ordinary student, with all the insecurities, moments of crisis, and instances of intellectual joy and deception that studying entails? Can a more distanced, or even non-participatory, mode of observing what students and lecturers do and how they talk in the classroom be a shrewd strategy? At least, this would liberate the observer from re-integrating into student life and getting herself into a student’s state of mind—something she might not achieve anyhow. Even with a pledge to naïveté, the observer can hardly pretend to ‘start from scratch’: She has been socialized into a field of study herself, a trait that cannot be stripped off like a tamarind’s peel.

If the observer were unable to immerse herself into students’ practices, or if the observer remained the odd person out, some dimensions of training scenes might remain incomprehensible to her. But she can still catch up with students’ perspectives by means of qualitative interviewing. These interviewing procedures may consist of more formal semi-structured or narrative interviews; of more informal ad-hoc conversations after exercises, excursions, exams; or of group discussions with a bunch of lecturers teaching the same class or a bunch of students taking the same course. Qualitative interviewing opens up a discursive realm apart from hackneyed accounts of what it means to be enculturated epistemologically into an academic field. Listening to the director of an academic programme who outlines her hopes for intellectual achievement during a welcome ceremony for first-year students may yield fewer surprises than talking in person to lecturers and students about the nitty-gritty of their daily struggles in academic training.

The observer’s task of balancing her position in the field as well as the partiality of her perspective while navigating the breadths and depths of epistemological enculturation by conducting interviews and observations is not an easy one. Situated amidst seminars, field trips, or informal classroom conversations, the observer is confronted with vocabularies and idioms that do not match any of the concepts prevalent in pedagogy, educational sociology, didactics, or other specialties that have looked deeply into student life. Also, the observer has to be prepared that her interviewees, including the most experienced and thoughtful lecturers, confront her with fragmented and disorderly, or incoherent and contradictory, epistemologies that are poles apart from the expectations of professional philosophers of science. Disturbing views on what good academic practice should look like or on how students should get acquainted with that practice must not be interpreted as a deficiency of the interlocutors; rather, the occurrence of such disturbances can be considered a crucial event, since they cut against the grain of what we expected before entering the field.

These encounters are undergirded by questions of normativity and positionality. Being an observer in settings that we, as scholars, know well, albeit in a different role, makes it difficult to come up with a non-normative stance towards what is going on in academic training. While the subjects of the classes we observe might be as foreign to us as to the novices themselves, we sometimes pride ourselves on knowing what academia is all about. And then there are our long-held beliefs about good academic training and proper teaching, too. So how to get into an analytically playful position towards the microcosms in which fieldwork takes place? ‘Symmetry’ may be the word of the day: With the same deadpan attitude that Bloor (1976, p. 5) adopted to remain ‘impartial with respect to truth or falsity, rationality or irrationality, success or failure’ of scientific knowledge, we can approach academic training unescorted by a normative focus on its effectiveness, its thoughtfulness, or its intellectual richness, when examining the ways and means of epistemological enculturation into a thought collective. It is much more intriguing to make sense of the criteria that lecturers and students themselves construe when they talk about ‘an effective exercise’ or a ‘thought-provoking class.’

Conclusion

Academic training has often been understood as an integration into the behavioural norms and tacit traditions of the university, while the epistemological underpinnings of becoming a capable member of a thought collective remained in the shade in studies of student life. Analysing training scenes shifts attention to the acquisition, consolidation, and transformation of epistemological concepts and values—processes that are manual and intellectual to equal degrees, and involve students, lecturers, as well as other actors taking part in university education. If done in a comparative fashion, fieldwork on training scenes across academic specialties has the potential to apprehend the bewildering diversity of epistemological ideas as they make their appearance in the classroom.

Our take on epistemological enculturation has little to do with efficiency-driven, goal-oriented, and bureaucratically inclined notions of the ‘performance’ and ‘excellence’ of today’s universities—an entrepreneurial discourse impressively analyzed by Sørensen and Traweek (2022) in their recent book, which renews interest in critical university studies. Critical means to us: observing closely. Taking note of training scenes in very specific fields and places confronts high-flying versions of academic training with mundane moments of teaching and learning. From this angle, lecturers and students appear as momentous protagonists in small-scale thought collectives that are enmeshed in their very own histories of ideas and crafts.

As Wylie (2021, p. 145) points out, students are not ‘somewhat empty vessels to be filled with appropriate knowledge and skills.’ In the nitty-gritty of academic training, students engage both hands-on and heads-on with the practical and intellectual traditions of their field of study, though without that process being easily manageable or foreseeable by the lecturers. We conceive of epistemological enculturation as an open-ended process teeming with subtle negotiations and intellectual as well as pragmatic resistance to the subject matter. Even the most established epistemological tenets that travel through classrooms in many fields—take falsificationism as an example—have to undergo a process of appropriation, use, questioning, and incorporation to remain a vivid part of scientific practice. Such an understanding of epistemological enculturation as a struggle leaves room to reconsider the rebellious underbelly of academic training and its potential for altering the very principles and postulates from which it started.

In this view, academic training becomes apparent as a philosophical issue in that it endows students with the intellectual capacities to manoeuvre through the thicket of epistemological concerns and questions emerging all along their journey at the university. It is all the more astonishing that the philosophies in the wild which students develop over the course of their studies have found so little attention in science studies. Perhaps this is because the great majority of university graduates never actually become professional scientists. Their epistemological concepts and values, however, become influential far beyond the university, both temporally and spatially.

Examining the norms and forms of epistemological enculturation might be crucial in a time when public expectations about the reliability and trustworthiness of scientific knowledge are immense. At stake are the ways in which knowledge claims are being approached, discussed, and criticized. In these instances, cultivating an Althusserian sensibility for metascientific ideas operative in academic training and research helps understand what becomes a matter of scientific concern, what is regarded as proper science, and on which terms validity is ascribed to (or withdrawn from) scientific knowledge—be it in academic study, in professional practice, or, far from the least, in everyday life.

Author biographies

Kris Decker is a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen.

Christoph Hoffmann is Professor of Science Studies at the University of Lucerne.