#745: “Both Are Useful”: Student Epistemic Navigation in a Co-Designed Science Unit about Traditional Chinese Medicine

Science education in rural China often privileges Western epistemology, creating disconnects with students’ community knowledge systems like Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). This design-based research study addresses this gap through a co-designed three-lesson unit in a rural middle school in central China. The unit on Shanghuo (上火, internal heat) positioned TCM and Western science as complementary systems with distinct goals, reasoning processes, and evidence criteria. Using a Knowledge Integration framework, analysis of 40 eighth-graders' responses reveals how students navigated between correspondence-based and reductionist causal reasoning without devaluing community knowledge. Students shifted from binary epistemological stances (“TCM is superstitious”) to purposeful differentiation, recognizing when each system serves specific purposes. Three instructional routines supported this work: organizing family knowledge as analyzable data, using parallel comparison structures, and scaffolding dual justification. Findings demonstrate that rural students possess rich epistemological resources that Western-dominant curricula render invisible, offering design guidelines for culturally relevant science pedagogy.