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1. “That's Just Gonna Make Them Upset”: Youth Authoring Emerging Epistemic Ideals Through Rightful Presence

   https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21938  

   Krishnamoorthy, Rishi; Duncan, Ravit Golan; Tan, Edna (January 2025, Science Education)

   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. 

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2. Probing beyond the biology: Centering a relational ontology in middle-school science modeling towards Rightful Presence

   Krishnamoorthy, R. (January 2023, International Conference of the Learning Sciences 2023)

   Modeling science phenomena serves as a tool to support science practices, where classroom environments and youths’ relations with each other and those in positions of power shape how the activity unfolds and what models are created. Grounded in a relational ontology, we build on justice-oriented approaches to studying youths’ learning towards their Rightful Presence by examining the expansive and political ways of knowing youth draw on while modeling. We followed a group of four middle-school youth and traced the human-human and human-more-than-human powered relations that shaped their models of short and long-term stress created across two multi-day lessons. We illustrate how models emerged as more-than-human entities with identities shaped through youths’ intra-group, student-teacher, and human-more-than-human relations, entangled with who and how youth are in and with this world. We also argue ceding power to youth to re-author their and their models’ rights supported more expansive understandings of youths’ learning. 

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3. Fostering critical consciousness: a systematic review of K-12 teachers’ integrations of sociopolitical issues in science and mathematics classrooms

   https://doi.org/10.1186/s43031-025-00126-y  

   Castro, Sheila_K; Brown, Julie_C; Crippen, Kent_J (April 2025, Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research)

   Abstract Efforts towards providing inclusive science and mathematics education for marginalized students are increasingly found in literature advocating for equity-oriented instruction through supporting students’ critical consciousness. Despite a growing body of research centering on teachers’ development of culturally relevant pedagogies, studies examining how teachers support students’ critical consciousness development are scarce in the context of science and mathematics education. Thus, this systematic review uses empirical literature on critical consciousness to explore teachers’ experiences integrating sociopolitical issues into their science and mathematics classrooms. Using keywords synonymous with critical consciousness, 19 studies were identified through searches in various databases. The 19 studies were analyzed through an iterative coding process to identify how teachers supported students’ critical reflection, critical efficacy, and critical action by analyzing reported incorporation of sociopolitical issues, instructional strategies, and science and mathematical practices. The results highlight four themes: (1) Teachers discussed sociopolitical issues at various distances to the self (2) Classroom discussions and community projects were used to engage students in their critical consciousness (3) Science and mathematics instruction and sociopolitical issues were used synergistically to further student understanding (4) Critical efficacy was seldom explicitly discussed in the studies. Implications of this study include suggestions for future research and practices. 

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4. Youth Critical Data Practices in the COVID-19 Multipandemic

   https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584211041631  

   Calabrese_Barton, Angela; Greenberg, Day; Turner, Chandler; Riter, Devon; Perez, Melissa; Tasker, Tammy; Jones, Denise; Herrenkohl, Leslie_Rupert; Davis, Elizabeth_A (August 2021, AERA Open)

   This study investigates how youth from two cities in the United States engage in critical data practices as they learn about and take action in their lives and communities in relation to COVID-19 and its intersections with justice-related concerns. Guided by theories of critical data literacies and data justice, a historicized and future-oriented participatory methodological approach is used to center the lived lives and communities of participants through dialogic interviews and experience sampling method. Data were co-analyzed with participants using critical grounded theory. Findings illustrate how youth not only aimed to reveal the dynamic and human aspects of and relationships with data as they engage with/in the world as people who matter but also offered alternative infrastructures for counter data production and aggregation toward justice in the here and now and desired possible futures. Implications for studies of learning with/through data practices in everyday life in relation to issues of justice are discussed. 

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5. Jamming power: Youth agency and community‐driven science in a critical technology learning program

   https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.21843  

   Vakil, Sepehr; Reith, Alisa; Melo, Natalie Araujo (December 2022, Journal of Research in Science Teaching)

   Abstract In dialogue with science education and learning sciences research, in this article we develop a disciplinary‐specific view on youth and community agency for community‐based technology education. Cultivating agency is a central principle in our design and empirical study of the Young People's Race, Power, and Technology Program (YPRPT), a program designed to engage youth in critical inquiry about the technologies impacting their local communities. In this article, drawing from our multiyear partnership with a community‐based youth organization, we examine how agency was supported and constrained as a function of the practices we engaged in as a research team committed to participatory and justice‐centered education. Our findings illustrate ways that the emergence and enactment of agency, at both individual and community levels, works to interrupt, subvert, and creatively “jam” systems of power. We argue that cultivating agency in community‐driven science and technology learning requires an honest reckoning with the deeply entrenched racial and economic oppression in the United States. We contend that it is equally essential to commit to learning from, co‐designing with, and working in solidarity alongside the youth and communities that are most impacted by technologies that mediate our experiences—toward unveiling, resisting, and reimagining their powerful roles in our collective lives. 

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