Integrating science education with social justice is vital for preparing students to critically address significant societal issues like climate change and pandemics. This study examines the effectiveness of socioscientific system modeling as a tool within Justice-Centered Science Pedagogy (JCSP) to enhance middle school students' understanding of…

Background: Promoting engagement and motivation in early engineering experiences is important for fostering interest and retention in engineering. One method that has been effective for doing so is facilitating transformative experiences (TEs), which occurs when students apply academic content to everyday experience. Our goal was to explore the…

The present article explores how "movement-based performing arts" lessons focusing on bodily imagination may expand secondary school pupils' learning experiences. The study centers on the learning experiences and emotions of 28 participants described through art-based action research and the lens of interpretive inquiry. The results of…

The use of guided inquiry-based learning (GIBL) in a manner designed to challenge individual students' unscientific conceptions of science, has been researched widely. However, few (if any) studies have investigated the implementation of GIBL in a manner designed to challenge the fundamental patterns of students' context-dependent unscientific…

Before Heritage Middle School began working with the Participate Learning team to connect lessons to real-world issues, the teachers and leadership had established a goal to encourage students to become more empathic about issues in their community. Although a handful of students and teachers who participated in the school's gardening club were…

AMLE advocates for educators to respect and value young adolescents. Yet, the narrative surrounding early adolescence in the United States centers chaos, hormones, and emotional drama. Middle school educators repeat or hear some version of this narrative daily, yet it remains unchecked and unaddressed in professional development. Deficit…

Purpose: This paper aims to propose and evaluate an innovative approach to education for sustainable consumption (ESC) which empowers teenagers and young adults to improve sustainable consumption competences. This approach combines pedagogical learning approaches such as real-world learning (e.g. experiential learning and research-based learning)…

In this article, we describe how eighth-grade students and teacher candidates used sound and listening to remix and attune themselves (Stewart, 2011) to the dystopian novel "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury (2011). We situate our sound inquiries in relation to critical literacy (Vasquez, Janks, & Comber, 2019; Wargo, 2019) and sound…

Although reading comprehension research and instruction commonly focus on individuals' ability to extract meaning from text, eighth-grade students whose teachers chose to focus on engaged volitional reading, rather than comprehension, demonstrated expansive forms of meaning-making and purpose. Interviews and observations across two school years…

Culturally sustaining pedagogies have encouraged scholars to reimagine and rebuild justice-oriented classrooms across context and disciplines and provide opportunities for students to reclaim their ways of knowing and doing in schools. In this study, we seek to contextualize culturally sustaining teaching practices in integrated science and…

Inequities in opportunities to learn and become in engineering, especially for minoritized youth, are enduring and systemic. How students experience engineering education, through curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher/student interactions, all shape opportunities for identity development. In this paper we draw upon cultural studies and critical…

This article uses key concepts of Anzaldúan philosophy to describe the Mosquitoes & Me summer camp as "ciencia zurda" or "left-handed science." It details a day-in-the-life portrait of Elena, a first-generation Latina middle schooler, as she experiences the opportunities that Mosquitoes & Me provided for self-other…

In an era of global climate change, intertwined with social and ecological predation, there is growing recognition of the importance of building socially, environmentally, culturally pluralistic, just and sustainable futures. Yet many of the calls for reform and discourses around sustainability are authored and defined through top-down approaches,…

The integration of social and emotional learning into school curricula has been linked to a number of positive student outcomes, including increased academic achievement, the development of healthy relationships, and improved emotional self-regulation. Rarely, however, has research considered students' perspectives on which social and emotional…

The Transformative Experience Questionnaire (TEQ) has previously been used only in formal science learning environments to examine how students' learning experiences extend beyond the classroom into their daily lives. In the present study, an example of how this tool can be useful to assess transformative experiences in an informal learning…