Nicolas Tanchuk’s research while affiliated with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and other places

AI tutors are promised to expand access to personalized learning, improving student achievement and addressing disparities in resources available to students across socioeconomic contexts. The rapid development and introduction of AI tutors raises fundamental questions of epistemic trust in education. What criteria should guide students' critical assessments of the epistemic trustworthiness of these new technologies? And furthermore, how should these technologies and the environments in which they are situated be designed to improve their epistemic trustworthiness? In this article, Nicolas Tanchuk and Rebecca Taylor argue for a shared responsibility model of epistemic trust that includes a duty to collaboratively improve the epistemic environment. Building off prior frameworks, the model they advance identifies five higher‐order criteria to assess the epistemic credibility of individuals, tools, and institutions and to guide the co‐creation of the epistemic environment: (1) epistemic motivation, (2) epistemic inclusivity, (3) epistemic accountability, (4) epistemic accuracy, and (5) reciprocal epistemic transparency.

Background Despite claims made by teachers, teacher educators, and researchers, the dominant U.S. legal and political practice holds that teachers are not full professionals. Denying teachers’ full professional status limits teachers’ professional autonomy and leaves their work heavily controlled by external authorities. Are these external limits on teachers’ work justified? Definitions of what a full profession is vary, but nearly all require the professional to possess complex and specialized knowledge, which justifies the self-regulation of the field by its practitioners. Unlike the knowledge possessed by doctors and lawyers, the knowledge teachers possess is often thought to be insufficiently specialized and complex to meet this standard—they are claimed at best to be “semi-professionals.” Purpose This essay aims to show that leading arguments used to reject teachers’ claim to professional status rely on a misleadingly decontextualized picture of pedagogical knowledge traceable to Lee Shulman. Against this picture, I follow Gloria Ladson-Billings’s critique of Shulman from the perspective of culturally relevant pedagogy to advance what I refer to as the integrated account of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge. The integrated account of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge reveals that although teachers possess a unique and highly complex knowledge base, that knowledge base is always in large part hyper-context-specific. Once the hyper-context-specificity of teachers’ knowledge is appreciated, we discover that teachers’ claim to professional status is justified, contrary to prevailing legal and political practice. Research Design This essay uses empirically engaged philosophical methods to analyze the existing arguments against teachers’ claim to full professional status. By making the presuppositions and limitations of these arguments explicit, the analysis supports a revision in theory, policy, and practice toward the integrated account of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and teaching’s professional status. Recommendations The integrated account of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge recommends the development of professional institutions for teaching. Because pedagogical knowledge differs in its hyper-context-specificity from the more codifiable knowledge bases of other professions, the professional institutions and practices appropriate to teaching differ as well. To guide policy, research, and practice, I trace four commitments implied by the integrated account of pedagogical knowledge: (1) representation from learner communities in professional pathways; (2) professional organizations and standards rooted in hyper-context-specific knowledge; (3) culturally sustaining, teacher-driven law and policy creation processes; and (4) educational research that centers teachers’ professional wisdom.

This interview-based study examines how justice-oriented K-12 administrators and teachers in Iowa make sense of the recent state-level education policy, H.F. 802. Synthesizing literature on Critical Policy Analysis and epistemic justice, we introduce Critical Epistemic Policy Analysis to understand the micro-level impact of divisive education legislation on efforts to create just and inclusive schools. Findings highlight a sociopolitical terrain with ambivalent and shallow equity commitments, deteriorating support for equity work in schools, and a need to grapple with questions of divisiveness and solidarity in justice-oriented educational activism.

A central problem for phronetic case‐based approaches to the ethics of teaching lies in the proper determination of normative ethical problems. Judgments about the character of normative ethical problems depend in part on background beliefs about what is (or is not) of ethical value. Thus, to distinguish genuinely normative ethical problems, teachers seem to first require knowledge of what is of ethical value, which practical problems themselves cannot generate. To resolve this practical and theoretical problem, Nicolas Tanchuk and Alyssa Emery argue for a Deweyan approach to teacher ethics that asserts two central theses: First, negatively, that inductive evidence warrants skepticism about any normative theory grounded in external reasons — (purported) reasons that are actually or possibly disconnected from an agent's motivational set of beliefs, desires, and dispositions. Second, that a cognitive and affective orientation toward solving problems through learning survives skepticism about external ethical reasons, grounding the commitments of many anti‐oppressive teacher educators.

div>This interview-based study examines how justice-oriented K-12 administrators and teachers in Iowa make sense of the recent state-level education policy, H.F. 802. Synthesizing literature on Critical Policy Analysis and epistemic justice, we introduce Critical Epistemic Policy Analysis to understand the micro-level impact of divisive education legislation on efforts to create just and inclusive schools. Findings highlight a sociopolitical terrain with ambivalent and shallow equity commitments, deteriorating support for equity work in schools, and a need to grapple with questions of divisiveness and solidarity in justice-oriented educational activism.</div

div>This interview-based study examines how justice-oriented K-12 administrators and teachers in Iowa make sense of the recent state-level education policy, H.F. 802. Synthesizing literature on Critical Policy Analysis and epistemic justice, we introduce Critical Epistemic Policy Analysis to understand the micro-level impact of divisive education legislation on efforts to create just and inclusive schools. Findings highlight a sociopolitical terrain with ambivalent and shallow equity commitments, deteriorating support for equity work in schools, and a need to grapple with questions of divisiveness and solidarity in justice-oriented educational activism.</div

The concept of privilege is widely used in social justice education to denote unearned advantages accrued by members of dominant groups through the oppression of subordinate groups. In this conceptual essay, Nicolas Tanchuk, Tomas Rocha, and Marc Kruse argue that an atomistic conception of advantage implicit in the discourse of privilege supports persistent inequity between groups contrary to the intentions of social justice educators. To solve this “problem of privilege,” the authors draw on themes in Black feminist and Indigenous thought to advance a reframing of the way educators teach advantage that is based in foundational relational responsibilities. This new frame, social justice education as mutual aid, retains the power to describe oppressive relations between groups while portraying oppression as disadvantageous to all.

Designers of learning analytics dashboards (LADs) seek to 'optimize' educational decisions by providing information about learners to improve student performance. Descriptive studies reveal that current dashboard design practices fail to account for significant undemocratic moral risks. Little normative work has attended, however, to how LAD designers ought to conceive of the goal of "optimizing" educational decisions in light of core democratic values. We argue for three principles of 'Democratic Dashboard Design': Reciprocal Accountability; Intersectional Inclusion in Epistemic Justice; and a Prioritarian Principle of Educational Justice to address the undemocratic tendencies in current design practice. These principles can be used to ensure dashboard design, purchasing, and use serves, rather than undermines, the ends of a democratic society.