ABSTRACT

The available scientific evidence shows that, unless urgent and drastic action is taken, critical tipping points in the climate and the ecosystems that support human civilization may be crossed within our students’ lifetimes. In such a historical conjuncture, teaching and learning about sustainability can hardly be disentangled from affectivity and hope. What is our role as science educators when we teach about climate change at a time in which the window to a safe future is closing? What sort of dialogical spaces can we create that shall allow students to approach the climate crisis as a subject matter while preserving a sense of agency and hope? As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, in this study, we investigate whether and the ways in which upper secondary students position themselves as meaningful actors when considering social, scientific, and technological solutions to the climate change problem in the context of science education. Building upon critical and cultural-historical perspectives, we theorize affect as inherently related to the development of societal, collective motives, and to how these motives become instantiated, made relevant, and addressed in situated practical activity through narratives and discourses about the past, present, and future. Drawing on interviews with upper-secondary school students, our analyzes identify formal contradictions that emerge in the students’ narratives and how these relate to equally contradictory affective configurations of hoping and caring. A lack of concrete pathways and understanding of the political dimensions of the climate crisis seem key to a prevalent lack of agency and hope.

ABSTRACT

For decades, science and engineering education researchers in the United States have sought to understand ways to realize more equitable, student-centered learning experiences within K-12 classrooms. One important line of research aligned to this aim has centered on opportunities for developing and supporting students’ epistemic agency, focusing on shifting epistemic agency away from residing solely in the teacher toward instead being enacted across the collaborative classroom community. Yet, despite extant research around this area of inquiry, little is known about how students negotiate epistemic agency amongst themselves. As research begins to delve into these critical student dynamics, we argue that the field must explicitly account for the varied powered relations ingrained within school spaces and how those relations impact students’ learning experiences. We then offer an illustrative example of student data to share a possible direction for critical analysis that could offer insight into such powered relations and how they play out and impact students’ epistemic agency, specifically through the concept of epistemic exclusion. Finally, we conclude with a call to action for educators and researchers.

ABSTRACT

As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, we examined how placing emotion at the heart of climate change discussions can deepen and transform STEM learning environments. Using Community Science Data Talks (CSDTs)—a small-scale, justice-centered, flexible discourse routine—we supported teachers in engaging students with locally sourced data on climate justice issues. CSDTs consist of approximately 15–20 min classroom conversations prompted by local data visualizations and informed by guided emotion participation, critical place-based education, transformative experiences, justice-centered STEM, and dominant, critical, and affective pedagogical goals. Employing interaction analysis of 58 classroom videos from 15 classrooms across three iterations of the study, two countries, and 2 years of data collection, we documented how emotional pathways emerged when teachers explicitly invited students to share their emotions about local data during CDSTs (e.g., “How do these data make you feel?”). These invitations facilitated guided emotion participation through two distinct pathways, student-led or teacher-led, depending on context. Additionally, affective pedagogical goals enabled students' funds of knowledge and funds of feeling to publicly interact, fostering the development of constructive hope and critical civic empathy at the intersection of emotion, place, and climate justice. These findings underscore the importance of attending to emotion during STEM education to empathetically engage students in addressing local challenges and creating more just and sustainable communities.

ABSTRACT

This commentary highlights the urgent need to re-envision climate and environmental education in response to the escalating climate crisis and its far-reaching social, ecological, and political implications. As young people increasingly express concern for their futures, the authors call for a transformational change in science education that engages with climate change as a complex and pressing issue. To support such transformation, the commentary introduces a new section in the journal Science Education titled “Climate Change and Environmental Education,” providing a platform for empirical research, conceptual inquiries, and policy discourse on education's role in addressing planetary change. This section invites scholarship that expands our understanding of climate change and environmental education through transdisciplinary and justice-oriented approaches. Key areas of inquiry include learning across spaces, disciplines, and epistemologies, action-oriented learning through community-based and participatory approaches, and attending to emotional well-being while using action to cultivate hope. By advancing these conversations, researchers can critically examine how education fosters the knowledge, agency, and ethical commitments necessary for engaging with the complexities of climate change.

ABSTRACT

In this special issue, we feature scholarship focused on understanding the organizational context of science teacher learning. The special issue grew out of discussions among professional learning researchers and practitioners over the last several years that highlighted the following concerns: (a) that teacher learning in professional development showed up in vastly different ways in teachers' instructional practice; (b) that traditional research on the role of individual teacher traits (existing knowledge, skills, and beliefs) did not fully explain this variation; (c) that simply listing organizational features as barriers to teacher learning did not allow for a theoretical understanding of the interplay of teacher learning within organizations; and that (d) the existing literature that took up this interplay was not yet well known in the science education community. Together, these concerns signaled a need for a repertoire of work to support research and design practices that situate teacher learning within their organizations. The 14 original empirical and conceptual pieces that compose the special issue examine the ways teacher learning is shaped by the sociocultural and historical institutions of schooling that teachers work within and navigate as part of their daily practice. Teachers are positioned, not solely as conduits of reform nor as constrained actors within their organizational environment, but rather as agentive learners situated in complex contexts.

The work of this special issue mirrors the kinds of design features championed within the issue's articles. It began in scholarly relationships that were developed through mutual admiration, and germinated on a kayak trip during a conference in San Diego. The special issue grew and flourished through group gatherings at the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST), culminating in a NARST invited poster session. Similar to the resources noted across many of the included studies, the collective learning featured in these articles was fostered through infrastructure (support from Science Education and NARST), a culture of collaboration (zoom sessions, group discussions of theory and methods), and relationships (mentoring, happy hours, laughing). This emergent process has culminated in a set of articles that examine, unpack, and challenge the concerns that sparked the special issue, providing new and innovative understandings. Enjoy!

ABSTRACT

From early on, families play a critical role in fostering their children's science development, particularly through shared interactions in the home science environment (HSE). The quality of these interactions is deemed pivotal for children's science learning. However, there is limited understanding regarding the quality of interactions between parents and children when exploring science together and how these interactions relate to children's science knowledge, motivation, and engagement. This study seeks to bridge these gaps by thoroughly investigating interaction quality in the context of shared book reading about an age-appropriate science topic among 61 parent-child pairs, taking a global perspective by focusing on three broader generic and domain-specific dimensions of interaction quality. The findings revealed that parents provided high-quality emotional-motivational but limited cognitive and science-specific support, varying greatly among families. Furthermore, parents' cognitive and science-specific support were associated with children's science knowledge. Emotional-motivational support was closely linked to children's engagement in science in the observed situation. However, relationships with children's science motivation exhibited mixed findings, with some positive associations observed with their enjoyment but no associations with their self-efficacy in science. These insights shed light on the role of interaction quality in the HSE, and which types of parental support are critical in shaping children's science learning. Future research could prioritize a more comprehensive investigation of interaction quality in the HSE to enhance the understanding of interaction quality and its impact on children's science development, potentially extending beyond the HSE to other pertinent contexts.

ABSTRACT

This study delves into the realm of student conceptual change, examining shifting understandings as important steppingstones on the path to sensemaking and canonical understanding in science education. It explores the potential of a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) curriculum, aiming to provide equitable learning opportunities, especially for emerging bilingual (EB) student populations. To achieve this, elementary school educators from randomly assigned schools received professional development training to implement a novel curriculum encompassing both STEM and STEAM (STEM + Arts) approaches to life science instruction. These approaches comprised: (1) an NGSS-aligned STEM unit employing inquiry-based science instruction; (2) an NGSS-aligned STEAM unit utilizing Arts-based science instruction instead of inquiry methods. The results indicated that a STEAM-first approach was most beneficial in helping students change from non-canonical conceptual understanding toward more nuanced canonical science knowledge. Specifically, for EB students, the STEAM-first approach showed even more promise, signifying its potential to bridge educational disparities. Furthermore, the study revealed that the integration of Arts as an instructional tool to teach science education played a pivotal role in enhancing the overall learning experience among students. Arts integration stimulated motivation, invigorated conceptual understanding, and offered unique avenues for elucidating complex scientific concepts and terminologies. This research contributes valuable insights for improving science education instruction, emphasizing the efficacy of conceptual change toward canonical scientific understanding through patterns of instructional sequencing of effective STEAM integration. It provides educators with evidence-based strategies to foster inclusive and equitable science learning experiences, ultimately guiding students toward deeper conceptual comprehension.

Science Education, Volume 109, Issue 2, Page 335-336, March 2025.

ABSTRACT

As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, this paper examines the emergence and performance of hyperrationality in STEM classrooms. Hyperrationality describes verbal and embodied expressions whereby learners try to maintain an appearance of neutrality and emotional distance to give credence to political, socioscientific convictions, even under conditions where complete emotional detachment would be unconscionable. Hyperrationality in STEM learning environments poses a threat to human dignity (Espinoza et al. 2020) by reinscribing approaches to STEM that devalue the lives and lived experiences of those “othered”. We present a comparative analysis of cases taken from our respective (individual) studies focused on ethics, historicity, politics, and STEM learning. The first case is drawn from an undergraduate engineering ethics class discussion of militarized drones. The second case is from a year-long socioscientific unit on water enacted with Black children in a city wrestling with water shut-offs. In our analysis of these two cases, we consider how hyperrationality, the ungrievability of the other and racialized fear become components of interpretative repertoires that learners co-construct to compartmentalize and/or partially reconcile the inherent contradictions arising from these entanglements. Our cases evidence the emotional configurations of colonality that reinscribe imperialism, while also recognizing when/how nondominant communities resist these logics as they surface in STEM classrooms.

ABSTRACT

In STEM education, grit is increasingly the focus of research, with scholars and educators seeking to develop and test interventions that will enhance persistence. As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, in this paper, we use interviews with 12 white physics faculty to show that physics culture has taken up the narrative that grit is key to success in the discipline. Using affective technology (Zembylas and Leonardo, 2013), habitus (Bourdieu, 1972/1977) and emotional habitus (Gould et al. 2019) as theoretical anchors, our analysis shows that grit, as described by faculty participants, is part-and-parcel of a white physics habitus. In other words, grit acts to reproduce systems of dominance through the internalization of a set of structures, symbols, and worldviews that produce embodied, affective responses, drawing dominant actors toward particular embodiments of hard work and turning them away from others. Thus, we argue that power in physics is mediated through affect and embodiment. Employing qualitative case study methods, we theorize how whiteness, in part, is reproduced in the discipline—how physics came to and continues to be a discipline where power is concentrated in the bodies of white males. We end by joining with existing calls to refuse grit, building from the work of STEM Scholars of Color who have called attention to the suffering that is endemic to notions of schooling and school science.

ABSTRACT

Although many students exhibit interest and demonstrate academic preparedness in math and science, a significant proportion of students do not major in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. These students encounter systemic barriers to STEM opportunities related to their intersecting gender and racial/ethnic identities. This study uses intersectionality theory and Tinto's model of student departure to explore students' academic and social experiences and investigate structural factors which restrict their access to STEM participation. Surveys and interviews with students from six universities in North Carolina revealed that STEM fields often fail to attract a broad range of students due to inadequate academic support and students' perceptions of these disciplines as unwelcoming or uninteresting. The findings offer practical recommendations for improving diversity in STEM majors and emphasize the critical need for universities to address diverse students' values and aspirations as well as actively promote the benefits and opportunities offered by science and STEM fields more broadly.

ABSTRACT

The article introduces a design-and-effects-framework comprising five key features of effective professional development: (1) extended Duration, (2) Content Focus of input, (3) Coherence of input with practice, (4) Collegial Participation, and (5) Active Learning. The framework's general feasibility is investigated in a proof-of-concept study. Additionally, the influence of a single key feature is addressed in a quasi-experimental effectiveness study. Object of study is a professional development programme on experimentation as a method of inquiry-based science teaching. Change variables to indicate effectiveness are (a) teachers' PCK, (b) their beliefs, and (c) their classroom practice. Two experimental conditions in the professional development programme differed in addressing Active Learning: one set of teachers used peer coaching, the other set of teachers was mentor-coached. All teachers (N = 36) visited three school-internal workshops; they were visited twice in their lessons and coached on their classroom practice regarding experimentation. All teachers completed performance tests and questionnaires; a subset of teachers was videotaped in two lessons containing an experiment. Analyses show that teachers benefitted in both formats regarding content knowledge, while pedagogical content knowledge on experimentation remains constant. Teachers' beliefs on experimentation as a method of inquiry-based science teaching improved without favouring either of the conditions. Regarding classroom practice changes surface concerning opening experimentation as well as allocation of time on phases of experimentation. Overall, classroom practice appears to be robust towards change. While peer coaching teachers develop somewhat more advantageous, the gain appears disproportionate to the added administerial effort of actualising this format.

ABSTRACT

This study examines the impact of a single science museum visit on the science self-efficacy (SSE) of emerging adult learners. Building upon previous research, which showed a significant short-term impact of a museum visit on SSE, our study aims to replicate these findings and gain deeper insights into the underlying mechanisms contributing to increased SSE. In the present study, we implemented a randomized control trial design and hired a recruitment firm to ensure a representative sample through quota sampling. Participants were randomly assigned to either visit a museum (Treatment) or see a movie (Control). In addition to visiting their assigned excursion, participants completed pre-, post-, and delayed-post-surveys and a virtual interview. Results demonstrate that visiting a science museum had a significant positive short-term impact on SSE. Moreover, the museum visit led to an increase in SSE by broadening visitors’ perceptions of what counted as science. Although no significant longer-term impact on SSE was observed, participants who visited the museum maintained a broadened view of science even 3 months later. Interviews further revealed that positive performance interpretations during the museum visit, which were often achieved by participants exploring conceptually-accessible, hands-on exhibits at their own pace, played a vital role in enhancing SSE. Participants also described how the museum visit broadened their view of science by connecting science and daily activities. Implications of these findings for informal science education practitioners and directions for future research are discussed.

ABSTRACT

A longstanding failure to achieve racial and ethnic equity in STEM doctoral programs in the United States exists alongside a research landscape struggling to comprehensively explain this enduring failure. Towards a comprehensive explanatory model of STEM doctoral persistence and disruption of this failure, I previously proposed critical capital theory (CCT). CCT integrates critical race theory, forms of capital, and fictive kinship. Using a small-scale critical qualitative abductive study, I explored the extent to which CCT explained participants' experiences and their science doctoral program outcomes. Narratives of factors influencing doctoral persistence were interpreted from interviews of 3 female former science doctoral students from racially and ethnically marginalized communities. They experienced immediate, intense, and sustained overlapping forms of oppression in their doctoral programs. To cope, all activated different forms of capital including non-Bourdieuan forms. However, oppressive tactics used by faculty and administrators devalued their capital including supposedly high value Bourdieuan forms, constrained their ability to form fictive kinships within departmental networks, and negatively impacted their mental health and allegiances to science. To explain these findings, which align with other studies, I expand CCT to incorporate intersectionality and community cultural wealth and refined it to explicitly link capital, field, and habitus. Although the study's scale is small, these findings underscore the potential of CCT as an increasingly comprehensive tool to examine and explain STEM doctoral persistence. Further exploration across diverse STEM disciplines and contexts is needed to refine and generalize CCT, optimizing its utility to disrupt enduring inequities in STEM doctoral programs.

ABSTRACT

Elementary teacher educators endeavor to prepare prospective elementary teachers to teach science in ways which best support student learning. A well-documented challenge in teacher education is the disconnect between theory and practice which many programs have worked to overcome. One framework which has been used in many teacher preparation programs is practice-based teacher education which consists of three-parts: representation, decomposition, and approximations of practice. This framework has been studied in a number of contexts, but the ways in which prospective teachers recompose practice have not been fully explored. In this study, I examined the science teaching of three student teachers enrolled in the same teacher education program to understand how they enacted teaching practices from their teacher education coursework. Findings showed that each student teacher adopted a different, singular practice as their primary guide for teaching science rather than a more integrated and recomposed approach. This suggests that a more explicit focus on recomposition of practice is a necessary part of teacher education.

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to understand the actions carried out for dialog between science centers and science museums with the public of local communities living in a situation of socioeconomic vulnerability. The study adopted a quantitative and qualitative approach and the theoretical framework of science communication, of the exercise of citizenship and of engagement with science, using concepts such as Technoscientific Citizenship, Social Appropriation of Science and Technology, and Science Capital. Also, a few previous visitor studies on the same purpose of inclusion and social equity were considered. The methodology involved the participation of professionals who work in Brazilian institutions, in two stages of data collection, both carried out online. Initially, a questionnaire was answered by 69 professionals, of whom nine took part in in-depth interviews. The qualitative data was analyzed using the Discourse of the Collective Subject (DCS) method, from which the results have been presented in three Categories and twelve Synthesis-Speeches. The establishment of a dialog with a broader public involves taking on a long-term institutional commitment, developing broad access mechanisms with respect to cultural differences. It is fundamental to make constant and careful efforts to welcome a diverse public and meet the challenge of breaking down prejudices. The implementation of the social role of science centers and science museums not only democratize knowledge but promotes a freedom feeling and the raise of self-esteem of those who engage in its activities. The results corroborated previous studies, stating that to build a legacy and to foster significant changes in the profile of the audience, the social exclusion needs to be treated as a structural, complex, and multifaceted issue.

ABSTRACT

For decades, two critical challenges have plagued school science in the years it is compulsory for students in many educational contexts across the globe: how best to identify what science is meaningful for all students to learn during their formal school science education, and how to keep these students engaged in the learning of this science. Diverse science curriculum movements over these decades and throughout the English-speaking world have provided different conceptualizations about the science content and process students should learn, and suggested many pedagogical practices to engage students in that learning. However, the two intertwined challenges of specific concern for this article clearly remain: what science to include and how to foster student engagement with that science. In this paper, we first seek to provide insights relevant to these two challenges via reviews of extant research in three quite broad and important areas of scholarship: (a) the concepts of imagination and creativity, considered particularly through current cultural-historical approaches to early years science learning; (b) the long-standing support around the globe for a range of inquiry-based approaches; and (c) the German constructs of Didaktik and Bildung as existing paths from a non-Anglo context that assist the determination of choices of science for curriculum inclusion or rejection. We then consider how these three discussions can lead to considerations of school science curriculum that better address the two challenges. Though simple solutions for these complex and multifaceted challenges are unlikely and beyond the aim of this paper, interrelated aspects of our three discussions point to curriculum-focussed initiatives focussing on “big ideas” as a way to determine content. We conclude by briefly illustrating these considerations via the example of school science curriculum structured via the big ideas of science: that is, those that are argued to be fundamental to the learner over the course of their compulsory science education.

ABSTRACT

Even though virtual labs help students learn science content, little is known about how well students can later apply this learning to other contexts or tasks when compared to students who performed physical labs. The goal of this study was to understand how students who perform physical versus virtual labs were able to later apply what they learn to a new context and a more intricate physical lab. We also explored whether reducing the complexity of the physical lab, by setting up the apparatus before students conducted experiments, supported students' learning of physics concepts and relationships when compared to students who performed a virtual lab. Using a quasi-experimental research design, we randomly assigned 26, seventh and eighth grade classes from seven teachers' classes into two conditions, the virtual or pre-set-up physical pulley lab conditions. Using data collected from 385 students and 188 groups, we found that students who were in the virtual lab condition learned significantly more about the mechanics of pulleys than students in the physical lab condition as assessed by a content knowledge pre to posttest. We also found that students in the virtual condition performed better on answering and explaining a real-world scenario application question and took no longer to set up a more complex pulley system in small groups than students in the physical condition. We discuss limitations, implications, and directions for future research.

ABSTRACT

Teachers are members of school district organizations that have their own organizational culture and climate. We differentiate a school or district as an organizational cultural context from the broader community cultural context or individual sociocultural background; it stands as an intermediate context with effects that may differ from the external cultural influences while having profound influences on teachers’ thoughts, feelings, and actions. In this conceptual paper, we review the theoretical foundations of organizational culture and organizational climate, and the corresponding ideas of assumptions, values, artifacts, and shared perceptions of policies, practices, and routines. We then summarize types of research questions and research methods that are well-suited to the organizational culture and climate framework. We apply these concepts to two example cases from the field of science education. We identify potential research opportunities for organizational culture and climate in science education that can extend and deepen our efforts to understand teachers’ experiences within school organizations. This paper is part of the special issue on Teacher Learning and Practice within Organizational Contexts.

ABSTRACT

Evolution is challenging to understand for students. Frequently, students hold coexisting intuitive conceptions based on cognitive biases and scientific conceptions of evolution. For the self-regulation of intuitive and scientific conceptions, metacognitive awareness is fundamental. However, students are mostly unaware of their conceptions. A criteria-referenced self-assessment of one's intuitive and scientific conceptions is one way to develop this metacognitive awareness and enhance conceptual knowledge. We investigated in a study with N = 432 upper secondary students how accurate students are in self-assessing intuitive and scientific conceptions of evolution, which possible explanations for inaccurate self-assessments exist, and which variables are related to self-assessment accuracy (e.g., prior conceptual knowledge, metaconceptual awareness and regulation, and self-efficacy). We found that self-assessment accuracy was moderate, with students self-assessing more intuitive and scientific conceptions than present. Possible explanations for inaccurate self-assessments were incorrect understandings of concepts, excessive self-assessments (of an intuitive concept in a context where it is appropriate; of a scientific concept despite incompleteness), and mix-ups of concepts. Self-assessment accuracy was predicted mainly by prior conceptual knowledge in terms of scientific conceptions and, in some analyses, by prior conceptual knowledge in terms of intuitive conceptions and self-efficacy. The findings have important implications for using self-assessment to develop metaconceptual awareness, for adjusting self-assessments to students' preconditions (e.g., prior knowledge), and for designing teaching approaches in evolution and science education.

ABSTRACT

This paper is situated within the vast literature that examines issues of under-representation, microaggressions, and social inequities faced by racially and gender diverse students in STEM education. As part of the special issue “Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education,” it focuses on analyzing the affective dimensions of racialized students' encounters in postsecondary settings to highlight affective politics of belonging to STEM fields within a Canadian context. Research on emotions in science education can benefit from a process-oriented view of emotions to better understand how exclusionary boundaries get (re)formed between bodies, which can inform science equity efforts. One major implication of this work is to offer a different analytical tool for approaching notions of belonging as commonly employed in science education literature. Through a cultural political analysis of emotions, desires, and affects, we seek to go beyond psycho-social views on belonging as synonymous with understanding students' sense of belonging in STEM. Sense of belonging maintains emotions as interiorized positive feelings, whereby belonging is often employed as a self-explanatory term, if not an end goal, conflating it with (group) identity. Rather, we seek to analyze how belonging is affectively constituted in day-to-day encounters between students and within spaces of postsecondary STEM. Careful not to reproduce deterministic and static analyses, we further attend to students' longings and desires for encountering STEM and higher education spaces anew. Finally, we consider some methodological affordances and limitations for attuning to the affective and embodied in students' responses to an exploratory survey.

ABSTRACT

To specifically add to the literature on Black girls cultivating their science genius, Black women science teachers ‘talk back’ by sharing and developing their own narratives about being a science-curious young Black girl and how they use that experience to actualize their vision for liberatory science teaching. This international, qualitative study centers the (re)flections and pedagogical practices of five “elder” Black women science teachers who have surpassed and live within some of the confines of “science as white property.” Utilizing an Endarkened Feminist Epistemology, participants engage in the art of (re)membering by writing poems to their former young Black girl self as a result of (re)flecting on creating the educational structures they wish they had experienced. The findings and discussion indicate that access to science professionals at home or a once-in-a-lifetime scholarship gave the participants the privilege to be curious. Despite these privileges these women had to persist through the culture of science that told them they didn't belong. Yet and still, they speak back with power and a determination to be seen and heard. This study provides implications for the curricular shifts and ideologies that honor Black girls in K-8 formal science spaces by merging liberatory teaching frameworks in science teaching and learning. Implications are also provided for professional development for Black women science teachers and other historically excluded groups, giving them space to (re)flect and to unearth their truth through reflecting on their history and collaborating with peers.

ABSTRACT

This study, which is part of the special issue on Teacher Learning and Practice in Organizational Contexts, investigated the ways in which urban middle school science teachers' organizational contexts influenced their ability to identify and leverage minoritized students' funds of knowledge (FoK) to facilitate equitable science learning through hybrid discourse. Ten science teachers received professional development from an external, university partner and ongoing professional learning as part of lesson study. We used a multiple case study methodology and applied the Instructional Capacity Framework and the concept of teacher agency to analyze lesson study artifacts (classroom videos, lesson plans, and TeachFX reports) and interviews where teachers described their perspectives on organizational barriers and facilitators to the implementation of hybrid discourse. Findings demonstrate how individual, organizational, and external factors interacted to produce differences in teams' approaches to hybrid discourse and the individual and collective agency they held for engaging in this work. To all teams, teacher agency was needed to challenge organizational culture and schooling norms that historically did not value minoritized students' FoK or opportunities to construct scientific understandings. External policies, especially high-stakes tests, reified this culture, which was, in turn, internalized by teachers and students as actors within the organization. These interacted with teachers' dispositions (e.g., critical reflexivity and perspectives on the value of students' FoK) as well as capacities within their organization generated via lesson study to influence the degree to which teachers exerted agency to implement hybrid discourse. We close by discussing implications for future teacher learning experiences aligned to equitable science instruction.

ABSTRACT

This study examines Chinese primary science teachers' professional learning experience in a web-based community of practice established and run by practitioners, with support from teacher researchers. Over time, it has grown into a preferred knowledge-sharing base for primary science teachers of the region and gradually gained national recognition. Through narrative inquiry, we reconstruct a story that shows how the community emerged and developed into a way of empowering Chinese primary science teachers in their own professional development. Adopting the community of practice framework (Wenger 1998) and with attention guided by the metaphorical space of temporality, sociality, and place, our analysis brings out how the external contexts, the organizational features, and the teachers' learning practices intertwined and contribute to the long-lasting success of this community. Some of the key organizational features we identify go beyond the ones stressed by the existing literature. More importantly, we show the critical role external contexts can play in the working mechanism of a web-based community. On that basis, we suggested the need to enrich the methodological choices and broaden the scope of this line of research.

ABSTRACT

Having a sense of belonging can promote persistence in the STEM fields, but less is known about what it means to develop that sense of belonging. To investigate this phenomenon, we conducted semi-structured interviews with a cohort of STEM students (n = 10) nearing graduation at an urban university regarding their sense of belonging and qualitatively coded the interviews using thematic analysis. Results revealed that all interviewed students clearly articulated feelings of belonging, making them an ideal population from which to learn more. We applied two frameworks to guide our understanding of what factors promoted the development of a sense of belonging for these students: the Network Theory of Social Capital and the Counterspaces Framework. The students described their experiences in relation to elements of social capital and counterspace processes as they reflected on the development of feelings of belonging. One element of social capital, “reinforcement,” or assurance and recognition of one's worthiness as a member of a group, was the most prevalent element of social capital influencing the participants' development of a sense of belonging. “Direct relational transactions,” or the exchange of resources within a community, was the most prevalent counterspace process discussed by the participants. Our findings expand the utility and add to the theoretical underpinnings of the two frameworks, indicating that gaining social capital and experiencing counterspaces can contribute to undergraduate STEM student development of a sense of belonging.

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to explore trends in interrelated engineering education and science education research within six science education research journals across the first decade since the release of the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards. Journals were selected using a combination of impact factors and random sampling. The resulting qualitative systematic review exposes trends that arose and fell among science education journals and scholars as reflected in 141 articles published between 2011 and 2024 in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Science Education, the International Journal of Science Education, School Science and Mathematics, the Journal of Science Teacher Education and Cultural Studies of Science Education. Through the analysis of 289 published research questions and purposes, themes of research and stakeholder foci were developed to uncover trends in research across this timespan. The greatest proportion of research examined student learning of science content through engineering experiences and teacher practice concerning science and engineering adjacent learning. Gaps in the literature are also described including studies in greater need of focus, most notably those that examine the roles of communities, families, learner agency, and access to engineering and science. Findings illuminate a need for improved resonance between the calls of policy for advancing access to science, STEM, and engineering education and literacies and research that remains most focused on traditional settings and structures.

ABSTRACT

The vast and rapidly growing amount of science education research makes it challenging for researchers to navigate and synthesize developments across the field, particularly concerning broad concepts evolving along divergent paths. To address this issue, a novel review methodology employing bibliometrics and network analysis was tested to identify and characterize clusters of research focused on the relationship between school-based science learning and contexts where that science is applied, experienced, observable, or otherwise relevant (e.g., socio-scientific inquiry, place-based learning, culturally-responsive pedagogy). Using a sample of 935 academic papers, the bibliometric network analysis revealed the landscape of contextualized science learning research, identifying 13 distinct clusters of scholarship. Bibliometric and qualitative data were used to describe the research trends within clusters and confirm they were conceptually meaningful and distinct. This methodology facilitated greater understanding of how research can become clustered into “invisible colleges” over time, offering a synthesis approach to grasp interrelated lines of research within an evolving landscape. The methodology has potential to identify other schools of thought or overarching themes in science education, enhancing researchers’ ability to perceive the field as a coherent landscape of interconnected ideas or to identify specific research trajectories within a broad concept.

ABSTRACT

The core function of science education is to equip students with scientific literacy, enabling them to understand complex environmental challenges and actively engage in proenvironmental behaviors. Therefore, understanding students' conceptions of environmental education is crucial for advancing environmental education. In this study, we explored undergraduate students' conceptions of environmental education and its relationship to approaches to learning from a phenomenographic perspective. We conducted interviews with 36 undergraduates and identified 5 qualitatively different categories of conceptions of environmental education, namely, “receiving information,” “disseminating and communicating,” “understanding,” “awareness and reflective thinking,” and “solving problems and taking action.” These categories are hierarchically ordered from lowest to highest, reflecting increasing complexity. Specifically, the first two were categorized as passive conceptions, while the last three were classified as active conceptions. Our findings showed that passive and active conceptions were evenly distributed among the students. In addition, a χ ² analysis revealed an observable correlation between students' conceptions and their adopted learning strategies. Particularly, students with more passive conceptions tended to employ surface learning strategies, whereas those with more active conceptions were inclined toward deep learning strategies. The implications of these findings for promoting students' proenvironmental behavior are discussed.

ABSTRACT

Traditionally, disciplinary science has been represented as void of and uninfluenced by emotions; therefore, the professional vision of science teaching and learning does not often include attending to the whole person, particularly the emotional needs of those that are harmed in science learning contexts. We find this exclusion untenable given the persistent harm that students of color suffer across science education contexts. As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, in this manuscript, we urge the field of science education to re-envision what science teachers need to attend to for equitable science teaching and learning. Indeed, we argue that science education is inequitable for students of color if their emotions within the classroom are not addressed. Thus, science teaching and teacher education needs to account for the ways emotions show up in science classrooms. Using illustrative vignettes from two science classrooms, we highlight the importance of developing an inner witness that is attuned to the emotional needs of students. We, then, use our equity-oriented inner witnesses to engage in pedagogical imaginings that critically interrogate our emotions and interpretations of what happened, what did not happen, how the students could have been better supported, how the teachers could have been better supported, and what it is about current models of science teaching and science professional vision that barred different possible responses. These instances, and what they illustrated to us about science (teacher) education, compelled us to explore and imagine science education research, policy, and practices that value engaging with emotional expressions–as both individually and sociopolitically situated–toward equitable science learning environments.

ABSTRACT

Addressing student conceptions is crucial in science education. Therefore, teachers should be able to notice and interpret situations, in which student conceptions are part of the complex classroom interactions. This study analyzes the skills known as professional vision using an interpretivist research paradigm and a sociocultural perspective. The central concern of this article is to describe the tacit knowledge about teaching and learning that frames and guides the professional vision of preservice and in-service biology teachers. To collect data, a video clip was used as a stimulus for 31 group discussions and 9 individual interviews with a total of 115 preservice and in-service biology teachers. The video clip showed classroom interactions between the teacher and students, specifically addressing student conceptions in evolution classes. From 40 available cases, a subsample of 15 contrasting ones was used for in-depth interpretation and typification. The comparative analyses reveal that these cases share a common feature: professional vision is carried out in an evaluative mode, with participants assessing the teacher's actions and the students' learning outcomes. In their evaluations, the four reconstructed types expressed type-specific tacit knowledge about teaching and learning. For example, they differ in their conceptualizations of teaching, which form the basis of the evaluation: (1) direct transmission of scientific norms, (2) establishing and facilitating access to scientific norms, (3) interaction that considers individual learners' point of view, and (4) contingent mediation between student conceptions and scientific norms. In the discussion, the results are related to learning theories and strategies for teaching the theory of evolution to develop suggestions for teacher education and professional development.

ABSTRACT

Examining the contextual nature of teacher professional learning is important for teachers of multilingual learners. Drawing on interview, classroom observation, and informal communication data for two focal dual language elementary science teachers, this qualitative comparative case study examines the situated nature of multilingual science teacher learning and practice processes: (1) What are the intersecting contexts that shape teachers' science learning-practice in multilingual classrooms? (2) In what ways do these contextual dimensions intersect to create opportunities and tensions in teacher learning-practice? Data come from a multiyear, multisite project that examines teacher learning and student discourse in science, language, and literacy instruction in dual language and multilingual classrooms. Drawing on the concept of “teacher learning-practice,” findings show how teachers engaged the contextual challenges of the pandemic, online teaching, and existing programmatic, school, and district structures, as a part of their own teacher learning, through a process of recontextualization. Findings show how the teachers' contexts served as catalysts and moderators in recontextualization, and that generalized district-based professional development was not meeting the needs of the teachers nor their multilingual students. This study provides empirical evidence for context as a key constituent of teacher learning-practice, showing how teacher learning cannot exist outside of teachers' instructional practice nor the contexts with(in) which teachers teach. This study adds to the literature calling for teacher professional learning opportunities to be localized to their teaching and learning contexts versus a “one-size-fits-all” approach that is typically used when planning and implementing professional development by illuminating the experiences of elementary science teachers working with multilingual students. This paper is part of the special issue on Teacher Learning and Practice within Organizational Contexts.

ABSTRACT

In instructional settings involving social interactions, emotions such as discomfort, embarrassment, and shame can be induced by social comparison of competence, judgment from peers, and conflict with other students. As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, this paper presents a case study of how four university engineering students in an introductory physics course addressed the emotional discomfort that arose when a hierarchy of competence emerged among group members, to demonstrate two points. First, local hierarchical positionings of who is more or less competent can create vulnerabilities and discomfort, which students can cope with by sharing and relating to each other's negative emotional experiences as engineering majors. This “emotional resonance” can be a resource for helping students locally reposition to find common ground and resist hierarchical positionings. Second, the local construction of hierarchical positioning among students, and the resulting emotional discomfort, can be supported by larger institutional structures and hierarchies within STEM culture. Although emotional resonance can locally alleviate discomfort and help students avoid hierarchical positionings, the legitimacy of positioning some students as “smarter” than others based on institutional labels and other markers of success can be left unchallenged. Therefore, efforts to support student emotions in STEM education should look beyond local interventions and critically examine pathways through which institutional structures and STEM culture can create hierarchical and competitive relations between students, generate feelings of not being “smart” enough, and increase the socioemotional risks of learning.

ABSTRACT

There is a growing body of scholarship in science education that attends to the role of affect as shaping youths' negotiation of and experiences with disciplinary science practices. As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, in this paper we examine how power and affect shape epistemic negotiations as youth and adults designed a community survey during a 7th grade biology unit on stress. We used interaction analysis methods to examine how care for the survey takers co-operatively emerged as an epistemic ideal when creating a community ethnography. The epistemic ideal was shaped by disrupting disciplinary practices, negotiating multidirectional powered adult-youth relations in the classroom, and youths' positionings in relation with macro-sociopolitical worlds. How youth characterized care was not neutral but involved youth experiencing politicized empathy towards survey takers coupled with them taking action against survey takers potentially experiencing harm through a tool of Eurocentric science (i.e., the survey). Overall, this work contributes to a critically nuanced understanding of how affect is entangled with and visible through the complex powered dynamics that youth and adults negotiate when engaging in sociopolitical allyship towards more just ways of knowing, examined through the emergence of epistemic ideals within an explicitly justice-oriented middle school science curriculum.

ABSTRACT

Recent research has focused on innovative instructional shifts that aim to expand what constitutes science and engineering practices, exploring also how they can build on students' diverse language resources in science learning. However, few studies explore the intersections of elementary teacher preparation and the implementation of science and engineering practices through expansive and asset-based approaches to language use. Through a qualitative case study conducted within a science methods course at a research university in the southeastern part of the United States, elementary preservice science teachers were positioned as agentive learners, engaging in modeling practices while leveraging their diverse language resources. Using multimodal interaction analysis (MIA), our study examined the meaning-making processes of elementary preservice science teachers in the practice of modeling. Findings revealed three themes related to how the preservice science teachers engaged with diverse semiotic resources: (1) their use of physical manipulatives and other multimodal resources to develop meanings during the initial stages of model development, where they experimented with different ways to represent their understanding; (2) their ongoing reliance on multimodal and linguistic resources for refining and solidifying meanings as the model became more complex and comprehensive throughout the modeling process; and (3) their use of these meanings to interpret and engage with science texts. Implications include the importance of providing elementary preservice science teachers with professional learning opportunities that align with the envisioned science learning experiences of their future students, thus fostering equitable science teaching and learning with models and modeling.

ABSTRACT

Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) programs are a burgeoning approach to engage teachers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) research that they can translate into their K-12 classrooms. Despite an increase in studies of RETs, there is a need for comparison of RET and non-RET teachers' student outcomes. This mixed methods, quasi-experimental comparison study, using a revised third-generation activity theory framework, investigates how an RET program for preservice and early career STEM teachers impacted participating teachers and their students up to 8 years after RET participation. Specifically, we conducted a matched comparison of student achievement data from students of nine RET teachers versus many non-RET comparison teachers within the same districts (n = 830–1132 students). We also investigated student and teacher perceptions of classroom practices through surveys (n = 576 students) and interviews (15 teacher interviews). Omnibus tests revealed no statistically significant differences by treatment in math or science achievement. However, students of the RET teachers reported stronger perceptions of STEM career awareness, greater value for learning STEM subjects, and a greater propensity to persist in STEM course tasks (three of the five constructs measured). This was consistent with teacher interview responses in which RET teachers spoke about STEM career awareness in a broader context for understanding the value of STEM in society, and also discussed struggles in research and attempts to bring this mindset to their students, which may have resulted in greater student engagement in their courses. Implications for teacher education and for supporting science and engineering practices in STEM classrooms are discussed along with recommendations for further research on the impacts of RET programs guided by a revised third-generation activity theory framework informed by this work.

Science Education, Volume 109, Issue 1, Page 1-2, January 2025.