Promoting epistemic virtues across the curriculum to educate 21st century citizens

In our Knowledge Society, the ease of access to information due to advanced and user-friendly technologies often gives us the illusion to know more than we do. This "epistemic is a danger to both democracy and public health. The educational system must therefore encourage good epistemic habits consistent with responsible citizenship. From a didactic perspective, this requires updating the curriculum in light of the educational challenge of the 21st century: training students to be virtuous epistemic agents by fostering their epistemic cognition. In this article, I intend to provide teachers with some useful operational guidance to achieve this goal. To this end, the epistemological concept of the virtuous epistemic agent is converted into a didactically fertile construct in two steps: first, observable knowledge-friendly behaviors are identified that can be regarded as clues to the habitus of the virtuous epistemic agent; then some procedural principles are formulated to help teachers design instructional activities that foster commitment to enacting those kinds of behaviors.