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We report on a project to support teachers and district administrators working with multilingual learners as they deepened relationships and understandings with multilingual families in five Oregon school districts. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which radically shifted the ways educators engaged with students' families, we repurposed this ongoing research to answer the question: How did teachers' and supporting administrators' conceptions of and actions to promote multilingual family engagement shift in response to the COVID-19 pandemic? Further influenced by the concurrent national protests for racial justice, we consider how teachers and administrators engaged in liberatory work as they questioned structures that had previously seemed inevitable or unproblematic. Framed using Harro's cycle of liberation, we discuss lessons learned based on systematic data collected from both teachers and administrators from multiple districts and multiple time points before and during pandemic-impacted schooling.

Rapid migration shifts, anti-immigrant discourses in the public sphere, and harsh immigration policies have posed daunting challenges for immigrant students, their families, their teachers, and their communities in the 21st century. Trends in public discourse and law enforcement in the United States mirror developments in European countries with high levels of immigration. Informed by the research and praxis of eight teams of researchers in the United States and Europe, this paper discusses how educators are conceptualizing ways to analyze and resist anti-immigration discourses and practices in school and community contexts.

This study explores the role of competing discourses that shape current practices in U.S. schools and how professional development efforts can support teachers and researchers in finding ways to reinsert more democratic processes into their collaborative work. We examine the case of one research and professional development project with the goal of supporting middle school science and ESOL teachers in fostering more meaningful science learning for all their students but especially their English language learners. Using Gee's notion of big-D discourses and Fairclough's notion of interdiscursivity, we trace how the Discourse of accountability, the Discourse of science teaching, and the Discourse of education research, each constructed by different stakeholders for different purposes, may become interdiscursive and hybridized through interaction over time. Excerpts from interviews and conversations with participants during the various components of our project highlight both the challenges and the possibilities of teachers retaining or regaining agency in their classrooms within and against the structures of the accountability Discourse. At the same time, we explore how our researcher Discourse also became hybridized in order to better work with a system where an undemocratic accountability Discourse continues to be dominant.

Science curriculum and instruction in K-12 settings in the United States is currently dominated by an emphasis on the science standards movement of the 1990s and the resulting standards-based high-stakes assessment and accountability movement of the 2000s. We argue that this focus has moved the field away from important philosophical understandings of science teaching and learning that have their roots in the history of both learning theory and scientific discovery. We offer a philosophical argument, as well as a model for implementation, grounded in the 19th century notion of "natural philosophy," as well as Dewean progressivism and Piaget's notion of reconstruction through rediscovery, for the important place of the history of science in modern science education. We provide curricular examples of this model, as well as a discussion of how it might be implemented as part of teacher education. We focus our discussion on the elementary and middle school grades, because teachers at these levels tend to have more limited science content knowledge than their secondary school peers, making them more dependent upon curricular materials and thus more heavily influenced by curricular reforms. (Contains 5 notes.)

We address issues of science curriculum for nonmainstream students--students of color, students learning English as a new language, and students from low-income families--who are often concentrated in urban schools. First, we describe a theoretical framework for equitable learning opportunities with nonmainstream students. Building on this framework, we then discuss challenges in designing and implementing science curriculum materials for these students. Although some of these challenges affect nonmainstream students more broadly, other challenges are more directly related to specific student groups. Next, we provide examples of curriculum development and research programs to illustrate key components in the theoretical framework and to highlight how these programs address challenges in curriculum design and implementation. Finally, we offer an agenda to guide future research and development efforts. We discuss how alternative, sometimes competing, theoretical views of curriculum development in the literature can be brought together in the context of high-stakes testing and accountability policy.

A key to improving urban science and mathematics education is to facilitate the mutual understanding of the participants involved and then look for strategies to bridge differences. Educators need new theoretical tools to do so. In this paper the argument is made that the concept of "boundary spanner" is such a tool. Boundary spanners are individuals, objects, media, and other experiences that link an organization to its environment. They serve critical communicative roles, such as bridges for bringing distinct discourses together, cultural guides to make discourses of the "other" more explicit, and change agents for potentially reshaping participants' discourses. This ethnographic study provides three examples of boundary spanners found in the context of an urban public high school of science, mathematics, and technology. boundary media, boundary objects, and boundary experiences. The analysis brings to the foreground students' and teachers' distinct discourses about "good student identity," "good student work," and "good summer experience" and demonstrates how boundary spanners shaped, were shaped by, and sometimes brought together participants' distinct discourses. An argument is made for boundary spanners' practical and theoretical utility: practically, as a tool for enhancing meaning-making between diverse groups, and theoretically, as a heuristic tool for understanding the reproductive and transformative aspects of urban science education.

In aiming to create a scientifically literate society, teachers are being asked to present science in a variety of new ways. Science is no longer to be seen primarily as a collection of facts and concepts, but rather, as a process of inquiry and discovery, similar to many of the decisions and actions all people make on a daily basis. The use of appropriate trade books is one way to accomplish this goal of showing science in the making. This article describes how evaluating trade books for good inquiry practices and scientific processed helped preservice teachers examine their future roles in the classroom. (Contains 1 figure.)