ABSTRACT
Supporting student success is increasingly important, especially in contexts where relatively few school-leavers access higher education and drop-out rates are high. Many student support initiatives suggest generic approaches that underestimate the significance of differences in knowledge-building processes across their various courses. While knowledge-building processes may seem intuitive to experts in the field, they are often opaque to students. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) provides useful conceptual tools to think about knowledge-building as working with epistemological constellation/s. An epistemological constellation is a cluster of ideas that is understood to be associated with one another. This chapter explores the metaphor of epistemological constellations, and how constellations of knowledge are used to build explanations and develop ways of knowing over time. I then analyse how two introductory courses (History and Sociology) work with constellations in different ways to build students’ knowledge of the field. One course works to develop one complex epistemological constellation over time, the other uses multiple and conflicting constellations simultaneously. The former focuses on part-whole relations, whereas the other focuses on stances. These differences are significant and not always visible to students. Initiatives for supporting the academic success of students should not neglect the significance of different approaches to knowledge-building. The analysis of epistemological constellations offers an important tool for empowering lecturers to make knowledge-building in their courses explicit to the students they teach.
