Bringing the epistemic gaze of education into the pediatric clinic: When parents report the teachers’ voice to challenge the pediatricians’ advice

In the contemporary knowledge society, tensions among different epistemic cultures and professional visions are increasingly common. When it comes to childcare, the need to consider the relationship between different expertise is even more relevant as different institutionally sanctioned caregivers (e.g., parents, healthcare professionals, nursery staff, preschool and schoolteachers) are responsible for children’s healthy development. But what happens when the caregivers’ voices do not align? Drawing on a corpus of 54 video-recorded pediatric visits and adopting a discourse analysis approach, this single-case study focuses on how a mother reports the teacher’s voice to resist the pediatricians’ advice on the management of a delicate topic (i.e., talking about death with the child). The article sheds light on how hierarchies of professional knowledge are locally negotiated and challenged: the teachers’ gaze and the pedagogical expertise it embodies are discursively treated by the parent as the legitimate epistemic and deontic authority over the pediatrician’s biomedical gaze.