  Students in inquiry science classrooms face an essential tension between
sharing new ideas and critically evaluating those ideas. Both sides of this
tension pose affective risks that can discourage further discussion, such as
the embarrassment of having an idea rejected. This paper presents a close
discourse analysis of three groups of undergraduate physics students in their
first discussions of the semester, detailing how they navigate these tensions
to create a safe space to make sense of physics together. A central finding is
that students and instructors alike rely on a common discursive resource,
epistemic distancing, to protect affect while beginning to engage with ideas in
productive ways. The groups differ in how soon, how often, and how deeply they
engage in figuring out mechanisms together, and these differences can be
explained, in part, by differences in how they epistemically distance
themselves from their claims. Implications for research include the importance
of considering the coupled dynamics of epistemology and affect in collaborative
sensemaking discussions. Implications for instruction include novel ways of
encouraging classroom discussion.
