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This paper is an introduction to and a synthesis of three papers in this issue written by scholars deeply committed to partnering with communities to understand and enact what it means to realize transformational ends in and through science education. Partnering for justice must be a conversation, a work in progress, and a critical examination that leads to intentional and careful forward movement. It is a beautiful effort at flattening power hierarchies so diverse voices and expertise can be interwoven in service of youth and communities who have been invisibilized and marginalized. Committed to realizing new, hope‐filled futures, the three pairs of authors use their experiences and expertise to shed light on the work of partnering using a temporal lens: considerations related to the beginnings, middles, and endings of partnering, each of which requires special intentionality and care. Together the authors share core overlapping tenets with other critical scholars that could be considered a partnering for justice epistemology. This epistemology underscores how importantly different learning through partnering for justice is from traditional notions of academic research. I close the paper by sharing lessons learned from my own 20‐plus years of partnering for justice, using the tenets of partnering for justice epistemology as a lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in languages and literacies in science education (LLSE) has developed substantial theoretical and pedagogical insights into how students learn science through language, discourse, and multimodal representations. At the same time, language is central to the functioning of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). On this common basis concerning the role of language, this paper explores how foundational ideas from LLSE studies can inform the use of GenAI in science education. A bibliometric analysis of 412 journal articles from Web of Science provided the initial step to identify major themes and relationships in the LLSE literature. The analysis revealed four clusters of research in LLSE: reading and writing scientific text, science discourse and interaction, multilingual science classroom, and multimodality and representations. Each cluster was further analyzed through close reading of selected articles to identify and connect key constructs to the potential use of GenAI. These constructs include the interactive‐constructive reading model, text genre, reading‐writing integration, dialogic interaction, critical questioning, argumentation, translanguaging, hybridity, thematic pattern, modal affordance, and transduction. From these ideas and connections, the paper recommends several pedagogical principles for science educators to guide the use of GenAI. It concludes that LLSE research offers valuable insights for researchers and teachers to investigate and design the use of GenAI in science education. In turn, the impending use of GenAI also calls for a rethinking of literacy that will shape future research in LLSE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science teachers struggle to implement and sustain new curricular ideas from professional development (PD) experiences. These PD opportunities are crucial for enacting real‐world changes to teaching practice and address pressing global challenges, such as the teaching and learning of socioscientific topics nested in school communities. Additionally, it is important to consider how school situative conditions are an important aspect in how science teachers learn, develop, and enact curricular practices in their classrooms. This paper is part of a special issue on Teacher Learning and Practice within Organizational Contexts. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to illustrate how researchers can frame research using the theory of practice architectures (TPA) as a lens to develop a dynamic socio‐material understanding of teacher learning within teachers' working environments and their local school communities. An ongoing multi‐year professional learning study with science teachers in an elementary school and secondary school was analyzed using TPA. Using a philosophical‐empirical approach, observations from PD sessions and collaborative meetings illustrated teachers' practices in the form of sayings, doings, and relatings and their changes over the duration of the observations with associated modifications in schools' practice architectures. Although specific school conditions, such as timetable restrictions and curriculum accountability, constrained teachers' practices they were still enabled to learn and develop their practices. Overall, TPA was found to be an insightful framework for theorizing changes in science teaching practices of teachers' saying, doings, and relatings at their school sites. Future research focused on PD within schools would benefit from using a TPA approach to theorizing science teacher learning and curriculum enactment practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we build on a growing body of research on practical measurement for educational improvement, contributing a conceptualization of the organizational functions of measurement in processes of persistence and change. Our work is grounded in theoretical understandings of micro‐institutional change that foreground processes of reproduction and disruption of organizational categories, priorities, assumptions, and practices. Drawing together measurement discourses from multiple fields of study, we identify four metaphors for organizational functions that measures can serve: carriers, windows, exercises, and drivers. We propose a conceptual framework illustrating relationships and pathways among these functions as they operate in context. We then apply the framework in the context of co‐designing three practical measures of science teacher learning in a large urban district, illustrating varied pathways through which the practical measures seemed to function, and documenting their respective affordances and constraints in driving reproduction and/or disruption in the organization's work to support science teacher learning. This line of work extends prior research on practical measurement through its focus on measures of science teacher learning and its attention to how practical measures can function to shape broader processes of organizational transformation and stability. This paper is part of the special issue on Teacher Learning and Practice within Organizational Contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding equitable practice is crucial for science education since science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and STEM learning practices remain significantly marked by structural inequalities. In this paper, building on theories of discourse and situated meaning developed by Foucault, Gee, and Sedgewick, we explore how educators navigated discourses about social justice in informal science learning (ISL) across four UK sites. We draw on qualitative, multimodal data across 5 years of a research–practice partnership between a university, a zoo, a social enterprise working to support girls and nonbinary youth in STEM, a community digital arts center, and a science center. We identify three key discourses that shaped social justice practices across all four practice–partner sites: (1) "inclusion" for STEM, (2) "inclusion" for the institution, and (3) "inclusion" for minoritized youth. We discuss how educators (n = 17) enacted, negotiated, resisted, and reworked these discourses to create equitable practice. We argue that while the three key discourses shaped the possible meanings and practices of equitable ISL in different ways, educators used their agency and creativity to develop more expansive visions of social justice. We discuss how the affordances, pitfalls, and contradictions that emerged within and between the three discourses were strategically navigated and disrupted by educators to support the minoritized youth they worked with, as well as to protect and promote equity in ISL. This paper contributes to research on social justice in ISL by grounding sometimes abstract questions about power and discourse in ISL educators' everyday work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although adults are known to play an important role in young children's development, little work has focused on the enactive features of scaffolding in informal learning settings, and the embodied dynamics of intergenerational interaction. To address this gap, this paper undertakes a microinteractional analysis to examine intergenerational collaborative interaction in a science museum setting. The paper presents a fine‐grained moment‐by‐moment analysis of video‐recorded interaction of children and their adult carers around science‐themed objects. Taking an enactive cognition perspective, the analysis enables access to subtle shifts in interactants' perception, action, gesture, and movement to examine how young children engage with exhibits, and the role adult action plays in supporting young children's engagement with exhibits and developing ideas about science. Our findings demonstrate that intergenerational "embodied scaffolding" is instrumental in making "enactive potentialities" in the environment more accessible for children, thus deepening and enriching children's engagement with science. Adult action is central to revealing scientific dimensions of objects' interaction and relationships in ways that expose novel types of perception and action opportunities in shaping science experiences and meaning making. This has implications for science education practices since it foregrounds not only "doing" science, through active hands‐on activities, but also speaks to the interconnectedness between senses and the role of the body in thinking. Drawing on the findings, this paper also offers design implications for informal science learning environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the views of leading Czech physicists regarding a physics curriculum for upper secondary schools. This paper presents the first part of an effort to define starting points for a new physics curriculum in Czechia (subsequent phases would analyze the opinions of other scientists, education experts, and physics teachers regarding the physicists' ideas) and create a new physics textbook for upper secondary schools. The methodology was inspired especially by the objectivist grounded theory. We conducted in‐depth interviews about the upper secondary physics curriculum with 29 leading Czech physicists and identified 56 ideas (categories) that they agreed on (according to the interview analysis). Subsequently, a questionnaire was created based on these 56 ideas. Two years later, the same group of physicists were asked to express their opinions on the ideas on a 7‐point Likert scale. The new survey sought to clarify the relevance and permanence of the ideas, and the physicists' willingness to collaborate on constructing a physics curriculum for upper secondary schools. Four core categories—students, physics, context, and math—were identified through a comparison of the relevance of the ideas. Additionally, we compared the questionnaire answers of a physicist with their opinions during the interview and identified 43 ideas as permanent (in the 2‐year interval). Surprisingly, 26 of the 29 researchers in the initial study completed the subsequent questionnaire survey and 13 among these expressed their willingness to contribute to the development of a physics textbook for upper secondary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in languages and literacies in science education (LLSE) has developed substantial theoretical and pedagogical insights into how students learn science through language, discourse, and multimodal representations. At the same time, language is central to the functioning of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). On this common basis concerning the role of language, this paper explores how foundational ideas from LLSE studies can inform the use of GenAI in science education. A bibliometric analysis of 412 journal articles from Web of Science provided the initial step to identify major themes and relationships in the LLSE literature. The analysis revealed four clusters of research in LLSE: reading and writing scientific text, science discourse and interaction, multilingual science classroom, and multimodality and representations. Each cluster was further analyzed through close reading of selected articles to identify and connect key constructs to the potential use of GenAI. These constructs include the interactive-constructive reading model, text genre, reading-writing integration, dialogic interaction, critical questioning, argumentation, translanguaging, hybridity, thematic pattern, modal affordance, and transduction. From these ideas and connections, the paper recommends several pedagogical principles for science educators to guide the use of GenAI. It concludes that LLSE research offers valuable insights for researchers and teachers to investigate and design the use of GenAI in science education. In turn, the impending use of GenAI also calls for a rethinking of literacy that will shape future research in LLSE.

Lack of access to STEMM mentors has been identified as a critical barrier to biomedical research careers, leading to a lack of diversity in this field. To address such a barrier, the National Institutes of Health invested funds to support institutions in developing research immersion programs to provide "underrepresented" students with mentored research experiences. While providing access and opportunity for research experiences is an important equity endeavor, a focus solely on broadening participation neglects the role of institutions in perpetuating hegemonic views of science. Institutions often fail to recognize how entanglements of affect and emotion shape youth experiences in these programs and work to (de)legitimize their sense of belonging in science and perpetuate the notion of science as for an exclusive few. In this paper, we describe findings from a project aimed at understanding the entanglement of emotion and affect in a research immersion program and how these entanglements shaped participants' sense of belongingness in the program and research more broadly. Drawing on a poststructural feminist framework, we come to understand how individual histories and emotional experiences with racial and gender stereotypes work at the meta‐affective level to contract feelings of belongingness in science for students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The predominant conceptualization of scientific literacy occurs on the micro scale of an individual person. However, scientific literacy can also be exhibited at the meso scale by groups of people in communities of place, practice, or interest. What comprises this community level scientific literacy (CSL) is both understudied and undertheorized. In this paper, we utilized a systematic literature review to describe how CSL is characterized in the extant literature and a Delphi survey of experts to elicit more current thought. Guided by cultural‐historical activity theory, inductive and deductive analyses produced seven elements of CSL and their constituent characteristics: (1) resources, (2) attributes of those resources, (3) actors, (4) interactions between actors, (5) contexts, (6) topics, and (7) purposes. The typology created through this process is meant to be generative, serving as a starting point for continuing refinement within science education and other fields related to science learning and knowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explored how various contextual resources accumulated over multiple years operated together to facilitate a team of high school teachers' sustained and agentive learning after a 4‐year research–practice partnership (RPP) grant concluded. Specifically, we examined constellations of resources that promoted the co‐evolution of the teachers' collective inquiry in the professional learning community (PLC) and classroom instruction, focused on supporting students' scientific explanations. We qualitatively analyzed the video/audio recordings of the PLC members' interactions in eight 75‐min PLC meetings (11 h) and a full‐day professional development (8 h) and classroom teaching (34 lessons) over the period of 6 months. We found that the contextual resources accumulated from the historical 4‐year RPP—including a culture of collaborative inquiry, collegial relationships, structures for teacher collaboration, and expertise embedded in individuals as well as co‐developed tools and practices (cultural, social, structural, and expertise resources)—were important. These resources, in combination with emerging teacher leadership (leadership resource) and timely supports, such as school leadership and district‐based funding for sustaining structures for collaboration (leadership and structural resources), enabled the teachers to launch and drive their own collaborative inquiry and shift instruction after the conclusion of the grant. The harmonized contexts led the teachers to learn across the PLC and classrooms by engaging in co‐evolution mechanisms—setting goals based on classroom data, reasoning about instructional practices using various representations of teaching, and experimenting on a set of common practices across classrooms. This paper is part of the special issue on Teacher Learning and Organizational Contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When learning about scientific phenomena, students are expected to mechanistically explain how underlying interactions produce the observable phenomenon and conceptually connect the observed phenomenon to canonical scientific knowledge. This paper investigates how the integration of the complementary processes of designing and refining computational models using real‐world data can support students in developing mechanistic and canonically accurate explanations of diffusion. Specifically, we examine two types of shifts in how students explain diffusion as they create and refine computational models using real‐world data: a shift towards mechanistic reasoning and a shift from noncanonical to canonical explanations. We present descriptive statistics for the whole class as well as three student work examples to illustrate these two shifts as 6th grade students engage in an 8‐day unit on the diffusion of ink in hot and cold water. Our findings show that (1) students develop mechanistic explanations as they build agent‐based models, (2) students' mechanistic reasoning can co‐exist with noncanonical explanations, and (3) students shift their thinking toward canonical explanations after comparing their models against data. These findings could inform the design of modeling tools that support learners in both expressing a diverse range of mechanistic explanations of scientific phenomena and aligning those explanations with canonical science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is one of three sequential papers interrogating equity in partnerships (or partnering relationships [PRs]) in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. In this piece, we prioritize abundance framing and dignity‐conferring work when engaging in partnerships with and for communities who have been historically marginalized. We propose a framework of seven drivers that define the directions and/or success of PRs: (1) mission, vision, or values; (2) goals or outcomes; (3) practices or processes; (4) power, privilege, or oppression; (5) communities and geography; (6) time and urgency; and (7) partners. This framework can be used to examine PRs at any phase of their existence to ensure equity‐centered and dignity‐conferring processes and outcomes. We discuss case studies that are common or specific challenges or frustrations that occur in nonequity‐centered PRs. We frame these as six vexations: (1) sustainable PRs; (2) dignity‐conferring PRs; (3) repetitive PRs; (4) political PRs; (5) "mission trip" PRs; (6) and deceptive PRs. We address these by using a data feminist lens (a perspective inspired by the book Data Feminism that centers on justice in defining and presenting outcomes), and future dreamings (a perspective that centers on potential ahead) to define our suggestions for designing intentional endings of partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is the second paper of a related three‐paper set that examines, critiques, and offers responses to current conceptions of academic advising within P‐20+ STEM education. In this essay, we offer a review of the current understandings of academic advising and its existing limitations with meaningfully supporting Black and Brown STEM learners. As a response to this critique, we call for a critical‐ecological perspective to STEM academic advising, leveraging Phenomenological Variant Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST) as the conceptual background for this approach. We then provide a set of guiding principles for educators to consider when taking a PVEST approach to academic advising. In providing these guiding principles, we situate the third paper in the set as those authors offer specific examples for how this approach can be implemented across the P‐20+ STEM spectrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concepts in science education such as "science identity" and "science capital" are informed by dominant epistemological and ontological positions, which translate into assumptions about what counts as science and whose science counts. In this theoretical paper we draw on decolonial and antiracist perspectives to examine these assumptions in light of the heterogeneous onto‐epistemological and axiological values, cultural perspectives, and contributions of nondominant groups, and specifically of those who have been historically marginalized based on their gender, race, ethnic, age, and/or social class identity. Building on these arguments, we critique deficit‐based approaches to science teaching, learning, and research, including those that focus on systemic injustice, yet leave intact dominant framings of the scientific enterprise, which are exclusionary and meritocratic. As an alternative, we offer a design of science teaching and learning for the pluriverse—"a world where many worlds fit". This alternative allows us to reconstruct science and science‐related "outcomes," such as identity, in the service of cultural, epistemic, and linguistic pluralism. We close the paper with the idea that because mainstream theories reproduce deficit framings and educational injustices, we must engage with decolonial1 theories of pluriversality and discuss different onto‐epistemologies to be able to grapple with existing social, racial, environmental injustices, and land‐based devastations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current science instruction does not educate K‐12 students equitably and creates short‐ and long‐term impacts on individual students and society. While students may be present in class, they may not have access to quality science learning experiences. The goals of this paper are to show how science instruction may not be reaching its aim of equitable access and to offer recommendations for creating a new baseline standard for equitable science instruction. Though not exhaustive, this paper identifies groups of students who are marginalized in current‐day science instruction—the racially minoritized, those with physical and cognitive differences, and those in urban or rural communities. First, this paper challenges the neutrality of science by highlighting systemic yet negative outcomes that disproportionately impact minoritized populations in everyday life because of the narrow network of people who define and solve problems. Second, this paper identifies examples where science instruction is not of its highest quality for the highlighted groups. Third, we present a synthesis of research‐informed solutions proposed to improve both the quality of science instruction and its equitable access for the highlighted groups, creating a new baseline standard for equitable science instruction. An elevated baseline would address the existing disparities in who has access to quality science instruction and consequently reduce the gatekeeper effect of who defines and solves societal problems that perpetuate intergenerational inequities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intercultural teaching practices for science education (ITPSE) are suitable to support science teachers in bringing cultural inclusion into their classrooms. The epistemological bridge is the base of the ITPSE design since this approach describes culturally inclusive teaching of science. There is an ITPSE of planning and one of enactment. With those ITPSE, teachers engage students in explaining a phenomenon from science's epistemology and nonhegemonic cultures' epistemologies. Design‐based research is the methodology to produce the ITPSE through three design–test–design cycles. This paper reports on the third cycle to identify evidence to redesign the ITPSE. As a result, the teacher enacted through the ITPSE a version of the epistemological bridge very close to the framework. In addition, her reflection and feedback pointed to the guiding tools refinement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of the special issue on Teacher Learning and Practice within Organizational Contexts. Shifting instructional practices in elementary schools to include more equitable, reform‐based pedagogies is imperative for supporting students’ development as science learners. Teachers need high quality professional development (PD) to learn such practices, but research shows considerable variability in the extent to which teachers implement instructional practices learned during PD. Individual teacher characteristics such as self‐efficacy may influence teacher learning during PD, but only account for part of the variability. The organizational conditions of teachers’ schools and districts may also play a key role in teachers’ implementation of new instructional practices. However, because systematic research in this area in science education is still nascent, it is difficult for districts and PD providers to address organizational barriers to professional learning. To meet this need, we conducted an explanatory mixed‐methods study using surveys (N = 54) and interviews (N = 19) of elementary teachers engaged in equity‐focused, reform‐based science PD, testing the degree to which a conceptually framed set of organizational conditions predicted teacher equity self‐efficacy and instructional practice alignment. Out of the 11 organizational conditions, only teacher professional impact and their sense of autonomy in their instructional practice explained variance in the outcomes. Qualitative findings showed these relationships to be iterative and recursive, rather than linear. Our findings underscore the essential role of teacher professionalism and sense of agency over commonly cited organizational conditions such as materials and labs in supporting teachers to implement more equitable science instructional practices during PD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of both professional science practice and children's science learning show that care is not merely ancillary to disciplinary work but a core and generative constituent of science practice. In science education research, however, students' care is often overlooked. In this paper, we describe the expression of care across two STEM classrooms (6th and 9th grade) studying biology and ecology and participating in a pen pal exchange. We analyze artifacts from the pen pal exchange as well as students' retrospective interviews and written reflections. Two ways of expressing care surfaced in students' letters: caring for guppies and caring for pen pals. We describe each form of care using examples from our data. We find that students' care for guppies and pen pals was both instrumental (in service of their investigations) and intrinsic (positioning guppies and pen pals as inherently valuable). We then connect these findings to studies of care in children's science learning and in professional science. We discuss methodological and practical implications for recognizing and analyzing how students' care manifests in classrooms and for designing learning activities that cultivate care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the special issue on Teacher Learning and Organizational Contexts, this paper explores the collective organizational sensemaking processes of middle school science teachers engaged in a design‐based research project focused on supporting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) identity and interest development of middle school youth with the design of a STEM ecosystem. Most of the literature on STEM ecosystems focuses on the pathways available or not for youth to develop robust STEM identities and interests. Research on STEM teachers in STEM ecosystems generally focuses on teachers’ roles in brokering youth's experiences across learning settings and not on teacher learning. We fill this gap in the literature through an examination of how teachers came to understand STEM ecosystems as a means for supporting youth interest and learning in STEM and their role as educators within STEM ecosystems that include but extend beyond classroom practice. We used interaction analysis of video and audio data collected over two cycles of professional development to describe how designed activities supported STEM teachers to surface and attend to sources of ambiguity between the two learning environments. Our findings suggest that teachers understood the out‐of‐school environment vis‐à‐vis their organizational contexts—such as, how valued outcomes of school, like teaching vocabulary, were being addressed. Over time, teachers came to value out‐of‐school learning as distinct from their classroom and as a space that is “not school” that provided necessary learning opportunities for students. The teachers recognized the unique ways the out‐of‐school STEM setting surfaced students’ strengths in ways not always afforded by school. Implications for professional learning design for in‐service science teachers to work toward providing more cohesive STEM learning experiences for youth are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a literature review of science teaching approaches that seek to support equity in science classrooms, focusing on marginalization based on (i) race/ethnicity, (ii) social class/socioeconomic background, and (iii) religion. Considered were approaches that science teachers can use in science classes in secondary schools. They were analyzed and discussed against the backdrop of critical pedagogy by Paulo Freire and the educational theory by Hannah Arendt, which constitutes a novelty in science education research. The review used meta interpretation combined with systematic searches in the ERIC database. It is, thus, limited to works published in English. A total of 930 articles (2013–2021) were identified out of which 64 were fully analyzed. The analysis shows that most approaches strive to provide more equal access to the existing science knowledge and structures of the community. This corresponds to the introduction to the "old world" in a conservative interpretation of Arendt's term. I argue that in addition, it is necessary to employ a more radical interpretation of the "old world" as fundamentally plural which is done in translanguaging and grappling with racism. Further, the transformative nature of science education needs to be strengthened in terms of Freire's critical pedagogy and Arendt's concept of natality. This means allowing students to become aware of oppressive structures to induce change. Only youth participatory science, youth participatory action research, and grappling with racism explicitly aim for this. This shows that nuanced perspectives on equity in science education are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although research has highlighted the challenges of teaching in urban settings, particularly for science teachers, it has paid less attention to the development of science teaching identities in urban settings. This paper situates science teaching identity within societal discourses of science, education, and teaching to explore the ways in which macro‐level discourses influence the positions available to science teachers in urban schools. Using questionnaire data from 64 teachers, discourse analysis is used to demonstrate how participants reinscribe or disrupt prominent macro‐level discourses, including the elitism of science, accountability, and deficit views of urban areas, and the resulting positions that are created by this negotiation process. The findings include possible positions relative to science, education, and teaching as well as a consideration of differences between elementary and secondary teachers and between beginning and experienced teachers. Although many participants successfully disrupted damaging discourses of science as elite and disconnected, as well as discourses of accountability and the role of standardized testing, they were not able to disrupt deficit discourses that resulted in positioning themselves as outside of their students' worlds, often as saviors. The findings demonstrated the strong influence of deficit discourses on teachers' descriptions of their experiences as science teachers and the need to support teachers in understanding the historical and cultural contexts of urban education to identify and disrupt deficit discourses and create teacher positions based on asset and justice‐based views of students, schools, and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An understanding of how sensemaking unfolds when elementary students engage in engineering design tasks is crucial to advancing engineering teaching and learning at K‐12 levels. Sensemaking has been widely studied in the context of science as a discipline. In this paper, we seek to contribute to the more nascent efforts to build theory about the characteristics of sensemaking in elementary school engineering. We report on an interpretive case study of a 3rd grade student team who worked with minimal adult intervention to design a solution to an engineering challenge. Considering the entire trajectory of their design process, from the given problem to the solution, we observed that they navigated through multiple epistemic conflicts while making decisions that informed their final solution. We found that these conflicts served as opportunities for sensemaking and that exploring how the students resolved conflicts shed light on their sensemaking processes. Analysis of the team's navigation through epistemic conflicts to come to a design decision helped identify two distinct kinds of engineering sensemaking: student engagement in functional reasoning as they suggested design ideas, and student engagement in mechanistic reasoning as they interpreted test results. Both processes facilitated knowledge building, which in turn supported students' engineering design decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essential aspect of scientific practice involves grappling with the generation of predictions, representations, interpretations, investigations, and communications related to scientific phenomena, all of which are inherently permeated with uncertainty. Transferring this practice from expert settings to the classroom is invaluable yet challenging. Teachers often perceive struggles as incidental, negative, and uncomfortable, assuming they stem from students' deficiencies in knowledge or understanding, which they feel compelled to promptly address to progress. While some empirical research has explored the role of scientific uncertainties in driving productive student struggle, few studies have explicitly examined or provided a framework to unpack scientific uncertainty as it manifests in the classroom, including the sources that lead to student struggle and how teachers can manage it effectively. In this position paper, we elucidate the importance of incorporating scientific uncertainties as pedagogical resources to foster student struggles through uncertainty from three perspectives: scientific literacy, student agency, and coherent trajectories of sensemaking. To develop a theoretical framework, we consider scientific uncertainty as a resource for productive struggle in the sensemaking process. We delve into two types (e.g., conceptual, epistemic), four sources (e.g., insufficiency, ambiguity, incoherence, conflict), and three desirability considerations (e.g., relevance, timing, complexity) of scientific uncertainties in student struggles to provide a theoretical foundation for understanding what students struggle with, why they struggle, and how scientific uncertainties can be effectively managed by teachers. With this framework, researchers and teachers can examine the (mis)alignments between uncertainty‐in‐design, uncertainty‐in‐practice, and uncertainty‐in‐reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instructional explanations are sometimes viewed as part of a nonconstructivist, solely teacher‐centered learning environment, leading to the perception that they are ineffective or inappropriate for teaching science. Consequently, teacher education programmes seldom focus on preparing teachers to explain scientific concepts effectively. Interestingly, the perception of a specific kind of instructional explanation in teaching has evolved in recent years: explanatory videos, in particular, are being viewed as promising digital tools for learning. This article asserts that instructional explanations constitute integral components within nearly all learning environments where communication about science takes place. It has two goals. Firstly, the article aims to develop a coherent, constructivist theory of explaining, including both teacher explanations and explanatory videos. This theory offers an inductive‐statistical explanation of the underlying mechanisms of communicative situations that involve experts and novices. Secondly, based on this constructivist perspective, the article distinguishes instructional explanations from scientific explanations and argumentation. It contends that (a) reducing instructional explanations solely to teacher‐centered, didactic teaching represents a misconception with potentially adverse effects and (b) it also is a misconception that instructional explanations, scientific explanations, and argumentation are (nearly) interchangeable. The paper argues that instructional explanations, including both teacher explanations and explanatory videos, are not only a potentially effective part of all kinds of science teaching but also a core practice of science teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Families commonly document their outings by capturing their experiences through digital photographs and videos. However, little is known about the ways in which families engage their personal mobile devices to document educational family outings and how they subsequently talk about the digital artifacts that captured their informal learning experiences. This paper presents new evidence on family digital artifact creation during an informal science institution (ISI) visit, the expected and actual uses of their digital artifacts after the visit, and family conversations reminiscing about the ISI visit with the digital artifacts. Using a concurrent triangulation mixed‐methods design, data on family digital artifact creation during an aquarium visit (N = 204) and digital artifact use after the visit (n = 67) were collected using parent surveys. Audio‐recorded parent‐child conversations with a subset of families (n = 25) document whether and how families use their digital artifacts to reminisce about the aquarium visit. Quantitative findings detail family digital technology practices during informal learning experiences, and qualitative findings suggest evidence of informal science learning in the everyday interactions of the families who elected to continue the study. The study indicates that family storytelling and digital technology practices may help to bridge informal science learning from ISI to home and frames family non‐participation within an anti‐deficit perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maintaining a commitment to social justice teaching can be especially challenging when navigating the bureaucratic systems and ever‐spiraling responsibilities of the education system. To better understand how social‐justice‐oriented educators navigate these tensions, this paper uses qualitative methods to investigate the social justice problems of practice identified by five chemistry teachers in a year‐long professional learning community. By analyzing the challenges described in their problem‐posing segments, I identify seven major themes that represent key sources of tension and possibility as teachers move from theory to practice in teaching chemistry for social justice. These findings indicate that the practical considerations of day‐to‐day teaching practice create the most salient tensions when moving from theoretical ideas of social justice to a deeply integrated enactment of social justice teaching. Through a deeper analysis of two cases, I demonstrate the effects of discussing problems of practice with a group of teachers who had similar disciplinary backgrounds and ideological stances. These discussions shifted the tensions from potential barriers to areas of possibility in which they were able to enact new ideas within the confines of their context. Taken together, these findings indicate that developing social justice educators requires attention to navigating the practical details of teaching from a social justice lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science educators are integrating more and more computational thinking (CT) activities into their curricula. Proponents of CT offer two motivations: familiarizing students with a realistic depiction of the computational nature of modern scientific practices and encouraging more students from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. However, some studies show that increasing exposure to computing may not necessarily translate to the hypothesized gains in participation by female students and students of color. Therefore, paying close attention to students' engagement in computationally intense science activities is important to finding more impactful ways to promote equitable science education. In this paper, we present an in‐depth analysis of the interactions among a small, racially diverse group of high school students during a chemistry unit with tightly integrated CT activities. We find a salient interaction between the students' engagement with the CT activities and their social identification with publicly recognizable categories such as "enjoys coding" or "finds computing boring." We show that CT activities in science education can lead to numerous rich interactions that could, if leveraged correctly, allow educators to facilitate more inclusive science classrooms. However, we also show that such opportunities would be missed unless teachers are attentive to them. We discuss the implications of our findings on future work to integrate CT across science curricula and teacher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reducing rates of degree non‐completion and widening participation in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) are key international policy concerns. This paper analyzes open‐ended response survey data from 1886 degree students in England, focusing on the 27% (n = 136/501) STEM and high‐status medicine (STEMM) degree students and 26% (n = 367/1385) non‐STEMM students who expressed concerns that they might not complete their degree. Insights are supplemented with two illustrative longitudinal case studies of young women, interviewed from age 10 to 21, who withdrew from their respective STEM degree courses. Around a quarter of both STEMM and non‐STEMM students expressed concerns that they might not complete and reported similar types of concern, with academic concerns being of prime importance—but particularly so among STEMM students. The percentage of students expressing concerns varied between STEMM disciplines (from 18% of maths students to 37% of computing students) and by student demographics, with women, racially minoritized, and students from less affluent backgrounds appearing most likely to worry that they might not complete. A Bourdieusian lens is employed to interpret patterns in the findings, challenging human capital explanations of non‐completion as due to individual student deficit ("misfits") with a sociostructural interpretation ("misrecognition") that draws attention to the role of capital and symbolic violence in shaping differential risks of non‐completion. Calls are made for the value of understanding STEMM student non‐completion as a structural issue, not just individual "unprepared" students who do not "fit" their degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that the current science curricula are failing to educate students to be competent outsiders to science. Historically, science education has rested on two premises. The first is that it is possible for students to acquire sufficient scientific knowledge from K‐12 education to become intellectually independent. That is that science education can produce individuals capable of evaluating scientific evidence and arguments critically for themselves. This belief is what underlies many of the conceptions of scientific literacy and is the basis of the rationale that is used to sustain and justify what is offered in nearly all countries across the globe. The second is the belief that the science that students will encounter will have been filtered such that it can be trusted. Nothing today could be further from the truth. Today, misinformation abounds and much of it purports to be scientific. Very few conceptions of scientific literacy have considered how students can be prepared to evaluate the claims that abound on social media. Current conceptions of "scientific literacy," we argue, are failing to articulate the competencies and knowledge required in today's changed context. In what follows, we lay out our arguments for why it is time to rethink the conception of scientific literacy by considering what it requires to be a competent outsider to science. Then drawing on our recent report, we lay out what might be done within science education to address the specific phenomenon of misinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students who identify as LGBTQ continue to report feelings of being unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. Access to a gender and sexual diversity (GSD)‐inclusive curriculum and supportive teachers may positively improve the school climate for LGBTQ students, but these supports are often not included in STEM classrooms. One response is to ensure that STEM teachers are prepared to integrate GSD‐inclusive STEM teaching into their classrooms. This review systematically analyzed the literature on supporting and affirming GSD in K‐12 and higher education STEM education contexts. The 81 selected studies were qualitatively analyzed using inductive thematic analysis and epistemic network analysis, and the findings showed that GSD‐inclusive STEM education literature coheres around six highly related constructs: Heteronormativity, Social Justice, Epistemic Knowledge of Science and Inquiry, Identity, Embodiment, and GSD language. Identifying these constructs, and the connections among them, led to the generation of an operational framework of GSD‐inclusive STEM teaching that can inform and guide STEM teacher education programs and STEM teacher professional development to develop STEM educators' equity literacy around GSD to foster bias‐free, equitable, inclusive STEM classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All authors were participants in the associated NSF-sponsored project Science Education Campaign for Research, Equity & Teaching (NSF #2029956). The first two essays of this issue belong among those published as the I Equity-Centered Science Education i Special Issue. Her framing and commentary piece complements the following papers published in the special issue: Kang, H., & González-Howard, M. (2022). [Extracted from the article]

This paper reports on a case study of undergraduate biology students' drawing‐based modeling and how this process plays out in naturalistic dialogues. Recent research has revealed the importance of drawings, talk, and gestures in students' model‐based reasoning. This study provides further insight into the complementary role of these multimodal representations in student' model‐based reasoning. The empirical basis constitutes sequences of students' interactive modeling during a laboratory exercise targeted toward the molecular mechanism behind diagnostic tests. The analytical procedure involves a social‐semiotic analysis of students' drawings and microanalyses of the sequences of student interaction while engaging with this modeling activity. Our findings reveal a pattern in the use of these representations and provide insights into their roles in students' model‐based reasoning. During three critical episodes in the students' modeling process, we show how drawings, deictic gestures, talk, and iconic gestures in a recurring pattern contributed to bringing students' meaning‐making forward: drawings contributed to opening a creative space for their reasoning, while explorative talk together with iconic gestures became an important resource in exploring the aspects that were not shown in the drawing. We also show how the different representations took on different semiotic loads depending on where in the modeling cycle they were. We show how certain semiotic choices in the first drawing seem to support the students' model‐based reasoning. Representing gestures became particularly important when the students revised and extended their models. These findings are discussed in relation to the different affordances of the various modes of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions of equity, diversity, and inclusion in the sciences have taken center stage in light of the COVID‐19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. This paper focuses on the experiences of academics engaging in such work, particularly in their roles as educators, by sharing two of the authors' experiences introducing equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives in a first‐year science course at a Canadian university. Using critical research methodologies like narrative inquiry and memory work, we look at three separate instances where complex personal, institutional and course attributes fostered, allowed, or hindered efforts to bring these initiatives into the classroom. We consider how problematic incidents and obstacles relating to the organization of content on equity, diversity, and inclusion in science cropped up during the process, how they were perceived and handled in the moment, as well as the authors' reflections, takeaways, and lessons learned from the experience. These stories suggest that efforts to center discussions about equity, diversity, and inclusion in undergraduate science classrooms can be unpredictable and complex, particularly at the day‐to‐day level; this is especially the case when handling subtler microaggressions rather than clear instances of discrimination or harassment. Our study points to the importance of creating a more permanent institutional memory for initiatives that outlive those who initiated and organized them, so that they become embedded within the culture of a course or department. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In considering goals for science education, it is conventional to make arguments for the utility of scientific knowledge for a variety of purposes. Less prominent are rationales based on the beauty or truth of science. In this paper, we examine how an approach to science education might be different if we shift the goals of communication to an appreciation of the ways in which our knowledge is limited, and how the practical boundaries of our knowledge can be closer than we think—in other words, how we are collectively ignorant. Key to this approach is a renewed understanding of the role of material investigations in providing partial knowledge. Instead of providing incontrovertible evidence, empirical investigations provide a form of "explanatory excess" whereby the appropriate choice of explanation is not necessarily one that can be simplistically determined. Although scientific practices provide techniques to minimize the possibility of error in making our conclusions, these practices are performed by fallible human communities, from which the notion of "tentative, yet durable" claims derives. We argue that public scientific literacy may be better served by more circumspect claims of validity, and crucially, an enhanced understanding of the ways in which materiality influences epistemic processes and limits our claims. We illustrate these proposals through the case of the International Young Physicists' Tournament, a contest that invites participants to play with interesting physical phenomena for over a year. We identify three factors prominent in these tournament problems that present possibilities for increasing the authenticity of practical investigations. These are (i) multiple physical interactions in phenomena leading to the openness of choice of explanatory theory; (ii) the qualitative, subjective nature of the explanatory utility of theories; and (iii) the material contingency of empirical investigations. We argue that a more open‐handed embrace of the limits of our knowledge may serve as a better epistemic orientation for science instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding equitable practice is crucial for science education since science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and STEM learning practices remain significantly marked by structural inequalities. In this paper, building on theories of discourse and situated meaning developed by Foucault, Gee, and Sedgewick, we explore how educators navigated discourses about social justice in informal science learning (ISL) across four UK sites. We draw on qualitative, multimodal data across 5 years of a research--practice partnership between a university, a zoo, a social enterprise working to support girls and nonbinary youth in STEM, a community digital arts center, and a science center. We identify three key discourses that shaped social justice practices across all four practice--partner sites: (1) "inclusion" for STEM, (2) "inclusion" for the institution, and (3) "inclusion" for minoritized youth. We discuss how educators (n = 17) enacted, negotiated, resisted, and reworked these discourses to create equitable practice. We argue that while the three key discourses shaped the possible meanings and practices of equitable ISL in different ways, educators used their agency and creativity to develop more expansive visions of social justice. We discuss how the affordances, pitfalls, and contradictions that emerged within and between the three discourses were strategically navigated and disrupted by educators to support the minoritized youth they worked with, as well as to protect and promote equity in ISL. This paper contributes to research on social justice in ISL by grounding sometimes abstract questions about power and discourse in ISL educators' everyday work.

Although adults are known to play an important role in young children's development, little work has focused on the enactive features of scaffolding in informal learning settings, and the embodied dynamics of intergenerational interaction. To address this gap, this paper undertakes a microinteractional analysis to examine intergenerational collaborative interaction in a science museum setting. The paper presents a fine-grained moment-by-moment analysis of video-recorded interaction of children and their adult carers around science-themed objects. Taking an enactive cognition perspective, the analysis enables access to subtle shifts in interactants' perception, action, gesture, and movement to examine how young children engage with exhibits, and the role adult action plays in supporting young children's engagement with exhibits and developing ideas about science. Our findings demonstrate that intergenerational "embodied scaffolding" is instrumental in making "enactive potentialities" in the environment more accessible for children, thus deepening and enriching children's engagement with science. Adult action is central to revealing scientific dimensions of objects' interaction and relationships in ways that expose novel types of perception and action opportunities in shaping science experiences and meaning making. This has implications for science education practices since it foregrounds not only "doing" science, through active hands-on activities, but also speaks to the interconnectedness between senses and the role of the body in thinking. Drawing on the findings, this paper also offers design implications for informal science learning environments.

This paper's focus is on the "middle" of partnerships for equity in science education. Middle is used in a temporal sense, meaning the time after the general purposes and terms of working together have been set and before outcomes have been achieved. The middle of the partnership also represents people interacting, bounded around the edges, by their institutional roles, norms, resources, and priorities. As co‐authors who had not previously collaborated (or even met in person), we approached the construction of this manuscript as a dialogue where we learn by sharing narrations of experiences and values and principles. We were inspired by the conversational book between Horton and Freire (1990) and specifically their discussion of "Is it possible to just teach biology?" (p. 102). In our conversation, we illustrate the ways in which partnerships may make justice‐oriented science education possible. Our focus is on complementary and contradictory knowledges, and ways of knowing, institutional resources and constraints, and strategies for making transformative change. We explore the middle of partnerships as a series of opportunities for learning and growing, caring for one another, and building solidarity spaces together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is evidence to support the existence of identity‐based disparities, inequities, and biases in the academic journal peer‐review process, little research supports the presence of this bias in the peer‐review process for academic journals in science education. Through an analysis of six leading journals in science education, we aimed to investigate the extent to which diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), as well as the presence of bias in the peer‐review process, are addressed by these journals. We analyzed trends in the gender/sex, geographical affiliation, race/ethnicity, and the presence of equity‐centered research focus for members of these journals' editors and editorial boards. We found that although gender/sex is well‐balanced in these journals' editors and editorial boards, they are typically North American centric, and White individuals are overwhelmingly represented. Four journals had a quarter or more of individuals who pursue equity‐centered research. Only two journals provided detailed information on how manuscripts are reviewed in their author submission guidelines. All used a double‐blind approach to peer‐review. One of the journals includes an explicit position on DEI. Based on the analyses and reflections on our own experiences, we recommend science education journals consider ways to probe whether bias does exist in their peer‐review process, diversify their board to be more inclusive of scholars from communities historically marginalized, and move to a triple‐blind approach to their peer‐review process as mechanisms to mitigate bias in the journal peer review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing equity issues in science education requires a reorientation to how science students are advised and how science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, particularly science, is viewed. STEM education is often figuratively described as a pipeline containing students who leak out before reaching the nexus of their STEM education/career journey. The authors of this paper argue that STEM education must be viewed from an ecosystems perspective, where students interact with one another, their physical environment and cultural contexts, and other humans who can support them in becoming STEM professionals. Within this STEM ecosystem, many individuals have a pivotal role in supporting students as they learn and develop within the science field. These individuals, particularly advisors, must possess knowledge, beliefs, skills, and dispositions that help students cultivate a sense of belonging, engage them in critical thinking about their academic and career choices, and aid their identity development in learning as becoming in STEM professions. The authors describe who these individuals are, the roles they play, and also provide practical examples, using vignettes, of how advisors can support students of color pursuing science degrees and careers. Finally, recognizing that students' STEM advising ecosystem operates at any grade level or stage of life, the authors have organized the descriptive portion of this study according to the following levels elementary, secondary, undergraduate, graduate, and career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we synthesize existing literature on Culturally Relevant Science Teaching (CRST), more specifically the third tenet of CRST‐developing students' sociopolitical or critical consciousness. While there is research on this third tenet, our review of the literature reveals that this tenet is understudied and underutilized. We offer our conceptual framework and an illustrative example to demonstrate how teachers can practically implement the third tenet of CRST to engage and empower students in science. We hope that the ideas and examples shared in this piece will help teachers foster students' sense of sociopolitical consciousness and advocacy within the walls of the classroom and beyond. We also urge researchers to continue producing research on this important topic so that practitioners can use this information to develop students' sociopolitical/critical awareness, reflections, and actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we outline how science teachers might engage in the work of creating educational equity. While acknowledging the historical inherent inequities associated with issues of access, opportunities to engage in science learning for individuals of marginalized identities (e.g., BIPOC individuals and women), and achievement, we broaden this definition to include social justice as a framework by which we can develop opportunities for the fostering of students' affinity identities with science. To this end, we draw on theorizations of equity within educational research, specifically discussed as excellence, equality, fairness, a zero‐sum game, and most recently, social justice. Additionally, we utilize McKinney de Royston and Nasir's (2017) Racialized Learning Ecologies framework. This framework provides a useful lens to notice the layers of (in)equity within education. We then extend this ecological model into science education and present three lenses (i.e., layers) through which equity operates within science teaching and learning. We conclude with a discussion of the practical implications of doing the work of equity, that is, recognizing, interpreting, and redressing inequity in science classrooms. Ultimately, we provide an actionable definition of equity that has the potential to facilitate transformative and socially just science teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both professional and classroom‐based scientific communities develop and test explanatory models of the natural world. For students to take up models as tools for sensemaking, practice must be agentive (where students use and revise models for specific purposes) and conceptually productive (where students make progress on their ideas). In this paper, we explore principles to support agentive and conceptually productive modeling. One is that models can "do work"; that is, participate in students' sensemaking by offering resources, making gaps visible, or pushing back on modelers' understandings. A second is that working across, and seeking to align, multiple models—what we explain as interlocking models—supports models to do work. A third is that modeling activity can support fine‐grained conceptual progress. We detail how we used these ideas to guide and refine the design of a fifth‐grade investigation into the conservation of matter across phase change. We identify four ways that models participated in students' sensemaking as they interlocked: by providing contradictions, constraints, representational surplus, and gaps for students to engage with. We discuss how designing for models to be co‐participants in sense‐making and to interlock can provide productive paths forward for curriculum designers, researchers, and teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the tools developed in the area of Science Education aimed at analyzing either the product or the process of argumentation do not consider the following: (a) arguments are a part of dialogues, (b) dialogues present different objectives, (c) dialogues start from different assumptions, and (d) dialogues shape the roles and moves of interlocutors. This paper intends to address the analysis of argumentative exchanges within educational science dialogues considering several aspects of argumentation that have neglected to be investigated in the field of education, such as the relations among individual moves and the dialogues they are part of, and the influence of such moves on knowledge construction. Toward this purpose, a proposed tool is presented, which describes argumentative dialogues in science teaching contexts across the varied and interrelated dimensions. This tool, consisting of six analytical aspects, is applied to high school chemistry students' argumentative dialogues taking place during modeling activities. Data collection (involving audio and video recording plus observations made by the researchers) revealed the main affordances of this tool as follows: (a) favoring an understanding of the individual and collective students' intentions; (b) enabling the characterization of argumentative discourse beyond the moves of refuting, questioning and providing support; (c) enabling the identification of whether knowledge construction has occurred; and (d) the possibility of analyzing teaching situations across different contexts. Thus, the tool supports the descriptions and analyses of the scientific argumentation process and the associated knowledge construction by students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science education researchers agree about the importance of evidence in science practices such as argumentation. Yet, disagreements and ambiguities about what counts as "evidence" in science classrooms pervade the literature. We argue that these ambiguities and disagreements can be viewed as falling along three fault lines: (i) the source of evidence, specifically, whether it must be first‐hand; (ii) whether "evidence" must always be empirical; and (iii) the extent to which evidence is inferred, and what degree of inference transforms "evidence" into something else. In this paper, after showing how these three fault lines manifest in the literature, we argue that these three dimensions of disagreements and ambiguities are not confined to research and research‐based curricula; they are also salient in teachers' classroom practice, as illustrated by a dramatic, multiday debate between a mentor teacher and her teacher intern. After establishing the salience of the three fault lines in both research and practice, we explore whether Next Generation Science Standard (NGSS) can provide a resolution to the teachers' debate and to the disagreements/ambiguities in the literature. Our analysis reveals that NGSS reproduces rather than resolves those three fault lines—but in doing so, it invites a resolution of a different type. Instead of providing a single, precise, context‐independent definition of "evidence," NGSS implicitly reflects a defensible view that what counts as "evidence" depends on the epistemic aims of the practices in which the students are engaged. This implied context‐dependency of what counts as good evidence use, we argue, could be made explicit in an addendum document clarifying aspects of NGSS. Doing so would provide valuable guidance to teachers, teacher educators, and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mechanistic reasoning is a powerful form of reasoning central to scientific explanations. Despite mechanistic reasoning being an important dimension of scientific practice and a central dimension of science curricula, students face difficulties in developing such type of reasoning. Many authors have been proposing tools for supporting its development; drawing is one such tool. Studies that purposefully explore how drawing leverages and supports students' mechanistic reasoning while engage in a process of constructing explanations are still scarce. The goal of the current study was to understand how students' mechanistic reasoning emerges and is enacted when students are jointly involved in drawing creation. For that, we drew on a recent framework that identifies essential characteristics of students' mechanistic reasoning and also on theories of distributed and embodied cognition. In this paper, we present a pair of middle school students who jointly explain a chemical phenomenon by creating drawings and reasoning with them. Using a fine‐grain analysis we examined the elements of students' mechanistic reasoning in relation to drawing creation and how talk and embodied actions on and with the drawings were used to support students' reasoning. Findings reveal that drawings played a key role in paving the way for students reasoning about mechanisms and in enacting mechanistic reasoning. In particular, drawings were essential for pushing students to look for a mechanism, for enabling and supporting mechanistic reasoning‐in‐action, and for facilitating productive interactions between the students that ended up in the construction of a sophisticated mechanistic explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the potential of civic science education (CSE), which includes experiences that have been intentionally designed to foster or enhance individuals' interactions with and/or engagement in science‐related public matters. To begin, we provide a theoretically‐grounded definition of CSE, including three sub‐categories: foundational, exploratory, and purposefully active. We then explore the scholarly arguments for why enacting CSE could help to support students' science learning and civic engagement and also strengthen civil society. Next, the paper examines current educational practices related to CSE, such as citizen science, exploring socioscientific issues, and various civic education pedagogies, detailing what researchers have learned from empirical studies of these practices. Building on this prior theory and research, we argue that CSE could motivate students both to learn science and become engaged in civic issues, with slightly different expected outcomes across the three CSE categories. We conclude by encouraging educators and researchers to explore the great potential of such practices, providing specific recommendations for curriculum development and empirical studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the views of leading Czech physicists regarding a physics curriculum for upper secondary schools. This paper presents the first part of an effort to define starting points for a new physics curriculum in Czechia (subsequent phases would analyze the opinions of other scientists, education experts, and physics teachers regarding the physicists' ideas) and create a new physics textbook for upper secondary schools. The methodology was inspired especially by the objectivist grounded theory. We conducted in-depth interviews about the upper secondary physics curriculum with 29 leading Czech physicists and identified 56 ideas (categories) that they agreed on (according to the interview analysis). Subsequently, a questionnaire was created based on these 56 ideas. Two years later, the same group of physicists were asked to express their opinions on the ideas on a 7-point Likert scale. The new survey sought to clarify the relevance and permanence of the ideas, and the physicists' willingness to collaborate on constructing a physics curriculum for upper secondary schools. Four core categories--students, physics, context, and math--were identified through a comparison of the relevance of the ideas. Additionally, we compared the questionnaire answers of a physicist with their opinions during the interview and identified 43 ideas as permanent (in the 2-year interval). Surprisingly, 26 of the 29 researchers in the initial study completed the subsequent questionnaire survey and 13 among these expressed their willingness to contribute to the development of a physics textbook for upper secondary schools.

This essay is the second paper of a related three-paper set that examines, critiques, and offers responses to current conceptions of academic advising within P-20+ STEM education. In this essay, we offer a review of the current understandings of academic advising and its existing limitations with meaningfully supporting Black and Brown STEM learners. As a response to this critique, we call for a critical-ecological perspective to STEM academic advising, leveraging Phenomenological Variant Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST) as the conceptual background for this approach. We then provide a set of guiding principles for educators to consider when taking a PVEST approach to academic advising. In providing these guiding principles, we situate the third paper in the set as those authors offer specific examples for how this approach can be implemented across the P-20+ STEM spectrum.

Concepts in science education such as "science identity" and "science capital" are informed by dominant epistemological and ontological positions, which translate into assumptions about what counts as science and whose science counts. In this theoretical paper we draw on decolonial and antiracist perspectives to examine these assumptions in light of the heterogeneous onto-epistemological and axiological values, cultural perspectives, and contributions of nondominant groups, and specifically of those who have been historically marginalized based on their gender, race, ethnic, age, and/or social class identity. Building on these arguments, we critique deficit-based approaches to science teaching, learning, and research, including those that focus on systemic injustice, yet leave intact dominant framings of the scientific enterprise, which are exclusionary and meritocratic. As an alternative, we offer a design of science teaching and learning for the pluriverse--"a world where many worlds fit". This alternative allows us to reconstruct science and science-related "outcomes," such as identity, in the service of cultural, epistemic, and linguistic pluralism. We close the paper with the idea that because mainstream theories reproduce deficit framings and educational injustices, we must engage with decolonial theories of pluriversality and discuss different onto-epistemologies to be able to grapple with existing social, racial, environmental injustices, and land-based devastations.