Positionalities, Personal Epistemologies, and Instruction: An Analysis

Abstract

Individuals’ sense of who they are and what their positions are in relation to others is known to be their positionality. Positionalities influence individuals’ conception of the world, thus their epistemologies. A few of the positionalities that exist, and included in this paper, are gender, spirituality, race/ethnicity, and social class. All these positionalities are socially constructed phenomena that affect individuals’ personal epistemologies. Not only do the educators’ positionalities and thus their epistemologies need to be examined, but also the influence of positionalities of learners on their epistemologies deserves to be studied. These positionalities could co-exist, thus, multiple positionalities could be affecting personal epistemologies. Certain situations require particular positionality to be more salient than others. Therefore, epistemologies tend to be situational.