JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING VOL. 37, NO. 7, PP. 691±718 (2000) The Epistemological Framing of a Discipline: Writing Science in University Oceanography Gregory J. Kelly, 1 Catherine Chen, 2 William Prothero 3 1 Graduate School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 2 Department of Science Education, California State University, Long Beach, California 3 Department of Geological Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, California Received 13 October 1999; accepted 12 April 2000 Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine how instruction in scienti®c writing in a university oceanography course communicated epistemological positions of this discipline. Drawing from sociological and anthropological studies of scienti®c communities, this study uses an ethnographic perspective to explore how teachers and students came to de®ne particular views of disciplinary knowledge through the everyday practices associated with teaching and learning oceanography. Writing in a scienti®c genre was supported by interactive CD-ROM which allowed students to access data representations from geological databases. In our analysis of the spoken and written discourse of the members of this course, we identi®ed epistemological issues such as uses of evidence, role of expertise, relevance of point of view, and limits to the authority of disciplinary inquiry. Implications for college science teaching are drawn.ß 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 37: 691±718, 2000 In the ethnographic study we describe in this paper, we entered as participant-observers; we began by asking ``what's happening here?'' and found that the writing of science by students and the talking about writing by instructors (course professor and teaching assistants) led to a fertile ground for examining how questions of knowledge construction, use, and representation are interactionally communicated in teaching and learning situations. Through an iterative ethnographic research cycle of posing questions; collecting, constructing, and analyzing data; and writing an ethnography; we focused on how the writing of a scienti®c genre in ``Geology 4: Oceanography'' (an introductory university course) foregrounded questions concerning disciplinary knowledge, thus making visible an epistemology of science. Our treatment of these epistemological issues began by identifying their importance to the participants and continued through the examination of the instructional practices associated with learning to Correspondence to: G. J. Kelly Contract grant sponsor: National Science Foundation, UCSB, Academic Committee on Research. National Academy of Educations Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. Contract grant number: DUE-9254192; DUE-9455758 ß 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.