Beyond disciplinary boundaries: epistemic infrastructure and cross-disciplinary environmental reasoning among pre-service teachers

Environmental challenges such as climate change and energy transitions transcend disciplinary boundaries, yet teacher preparation programs typically operate within disciplinary silos that inadequately prepare educators for the interdisciplinary nature of sustainability education. This convergent mixed-methods study examined how 25 pre-service teachers from science education and social studies education programs reasoned about sustainable energy through the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning (CER) framework, investigating whether structured argumentation can function as epistemic infrastructure that bridges rather than eliminates disciplinary ways of knowing. Following an 8-hour intervention addressing sustainable energy through CER, participants completed pretest-posttest assessments and 12 engaged in semi-structured interviews exploring their reasoning processes. Quantitative results revealed persistent disciplinary differences, with social studies participants achieving higher overall CER scores than science education participants, particularly in claim construction. However, qualitative analysis demonstrated that these differences reflected complementary epistemic strengths rather than varying competence levels. Science education participants emphasized systems thinking, mechanistic explanation, and empirical reasoning that provided essential technical foundations for environmental understanding. Social studies participants foregrounded critical questioning, power analysis, and justice considerations that offered crucial civic foundations for environmental citizenship. Integration analysis showed that CER functioned as epistemic infrastructure supporting cross-disciplinary dialogue while honoring distinct disciplinary contributions to environmental reasoning. High-performing participants from both groups demonstrated recognition of complementary approaches and identified specific mechanisms for collaborative environmental argumentation. The findings challenge instrumental accounts of argumentation frameworks and suggest that environmental education should leverage epistemic diversity as a resource for comprehensive sustainability education rather than seeking convergence toward predetermined approaches.