Course designs are full of implicit epistemological commitments. When a course requires students to construct an argument from primary sources and defend it against alternative interpretations, it assumes that knowledge is tentative, contested, and arrived at through reasoned inquiry.
When a course asks students to master an established body of technique and apply it accurately to prescribed problems, it assumes that knowledge is, at least provisionally, settled and that correctness is an achievable and assessable state. When a course treats students’ own professional or lived experience as valid evidence, it assumes that knowledge has multiple legitimate sources and that epistemic authority is distributed rather than conferred.
These assumptions are not mistakes; they are disciplinary commitments. The problem is that they are rarely made explicit.
Link to free Substack is here
