Science classroom assessment often requires multilingual learners to demonstrate ideas using only English-language resources. These assessments can provide an incomplete picture of students' knowledge and limit subsequent learning opportunities. Increasingly, science teachers are incorporating translanguaging pedagogies in their instructional…

Transformational equity-centered science education requires the fields of science education and school leadership to critically consider the limited preparation elementary principals are offered to lead for science education. Thus far, little effort has been made to foster a transdisciplinary curricula beyond traditional organizational theories…

There is a significant amount of research literature on the importance of identifying and building on students' experiences and ideas for making sense of the natural world, especially when engaging in science practices. Simultaneously, approaches to creating justice-oriented science education promote the need to focus on the diverse sense-making…

Children draw on diverse sensemaking repertoires that are inclusive of their cultural and community knowledge to make sense of science in the world around them. However, preservice teachers often do not notice the science embedded in children's explanations of phenomena. Discourses that frame children, particularly those from minoritized…

Research on translanguaging in science and engineering education has grown rapidly. Studies carried out across diverse contexts converge in their commitment to fostering equity in science and engineering learning for linguistically marginalized learners. However, the rapid growth of this research area has exposed different approaches to…

Gender equity issues remain a challenge in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, where women are highly underrepresented. As integrated STEM instruction becomes increasingly popular in elementary and middle school classrooms, it is important to consider whether the small group activities that are commonplace in STEM…

For over a century, genetic arguments for the existence of racial inequality have been used to oppose policies that promote social equality. And, over that same time period, American biology textbooks have repeatedly discussed genetic differences between races. This experiment tests whether racial terminology in the biology curriculum causes…

Guided by sociological perspectives that view (young) children as agents who are shaped by and shape the structures of social systems in which they live, we studied forms that agency of young children from historically marginalized groups may take in science class when offered opportunities to engage in science in a variety of ways, how curricular…

Focusing on a group of African American third graders who attend a high-poverty urban school, I explore the structure-agency dialectic within contested spaces situated in a dialogically oriented science classroom. Contested spaces entail the moments in which the students challenge each other's and their teacher's science ideas and, in the process,…

Even though school administrators and their leadership practices are rarely explored within science education research, our recent efforts to understand organizational influences on achievement disparities induced an elevated regard for elementary school principals. In this paper, we report on policy buffering by principals at schools whose…

This study focuses on a professional development program for science teachers near or on American Indian reservations in Montana. This program was framed by culturally relevant pedagogy premises and was characterized by instructional strategies and content foci resulting from the intersection between three cultures: tribal, science teaching, and…

This research examined the impact of the first-year implementation of an instructional intervention to promote achievement and equity in science and literacy for culturally and linguistically diverse elementary students. The research addressed three areas: (a) overall science and literacy achievement, (b) achievement gaps among demographic…