While environmental argumentation has recently received much attention from science educators, little consideration has been given to how personal identities and social relationships can either support or constrain student argumentation. This study attends to this issue by examining environmental argumentation as a sociocultural activity (how…

We examined third graders' understandings of condensation using an expanded notion of the Emergent Perspective, a reflexive consideration of individual and group meaning-making situated in the culture of the classroom. Data were collected from two small groups of students in an inquiry-based, urban classroom during a unit on the water cycle.…