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1. Preservice Teachers’ Support for Children’s Epistemic Agency in Elementary Science

   https://doi.org/10.22318/icls2024.669439  

   Bautista, Jessica; Davis, Elizabeth A (June 2024, Repository of the International Society of the Learning Sciences)

   Hoadley, C; Wang, X C (Ed.)

   Supporting children to make, explain, and reason through decisions about how to investigate scientific phenomena allows them to make sense of science content and practices in meaningful ways, positions children as agentic, and enables more equitable and just teaching. Novice teachers may use certain strategies and face unique challenges when engaging in this work. Drawing on written lesson plans, videorecords of lesson enactments, and interviews, this study explores five preservice teachers’ ideas and practices that positioned children as epistemic agents and identifies common tensions they negotiated. Each teacher demonstrated beliefs in children’s brilliance that were related to their practices, such as re-centering children’s ideas, working toward collective understanding, and engaging children in science practices. This study highlights early strengths of these five teachers and raises questions about teacher learning. 

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2. Fostering expansive and connective sensemaking with preservice secondary science teachers

   https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.21922  

   Watkins, Jessica; De Lucca, Natalie A.; Pao, Serena R. (December 2023, Journal of Research in Science Teaching)

   Abstract Preservice secondary science teachers often experience science learning in narrow and marginalizing ways in their science preparation. These experiences cause harm, particularly for preservice teachers of color. They also limit the disciplinary resources they can develop for later teaching science in ways that value and sustain their students' ways of knowing and being in the world. Our research explores possibilities for cultivating new spaces for preservice secondary science teachers to engage in science. In a content‐focused education course, we designed for and studied preservice teachers' engagement in expansive and connective sensemaking, incorporating heterogeneity, power, and historicity in pursuits of explanatory accounts of the natural world. In this article, we examined how this course design can support preservice teachers to attune to heterogeneity in ways of knowing in science and to connect to identity and historicity in scientific sensemaking. Our analysis suggests that students' final projects reflected attunements to diverse knowing, communicating, and relating in science and deep connections with their identities and future‐making, yet had fewer connections to sociohistorical narratives and structures. We developed illustrative case studies of four student projects, highlighting the personal, social, and political possibilities of creating space for future educators to imagine more expansive and connective forms of science. This study contributes a novel model for preservice science teacher education to support teacher learning to value and sustain their students' ways of knowing and being in the world. 

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3. Preservice Teachers’ Lesson Planning for Justice-Oriented Elementary Science

   Davis, E A; Bautista, J (January 2024, Association for Science Teacher Education conference, January 2024)

   Building on the literature, we designed a practical framework to support attention to equity and justice in science teacher education coursework. This framework presents four approaches for including justice moves in elementary science lessons, from increasing opportunity and access in science, to increasing identity and representation in science, to expanding what counts as science, to seeing science as a part of justice movements. We analyzed the lesson plans of 16 preservice elementary teachers who were using the practical justice framework. In addition to extensive attention to varying participation structures to support children’s science discourse, preservice teachers also took up more challenging moves such as attending to how children are positioned as scientists, inviting children’s science ideas and hearing the science in their ideas, encouraging decision-making in science practices, and connecting science to issues of justice. They varied in both the number of unique justice moves they took up and the specificity with which they planned for incorporating the moves. We discuss implications for practice and theory-building in relation to supporting preservice teachers in learning to teach science toward equity and justice. 

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4. Physics teachers integrating social justice with science content

   https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2022.pr.Huynh  

   Huynh, Tra; Gray, Kara E.; Bauman, Lauren C.; Hernandez, Jessica; Seeley, Lane; Scherr, Rachel E. (September 2022, Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings 2022)

   Frank, B.; Jones, D.; Ryan, Q. (Ed.)

   In this study, we showcase the various ways high school physics teachers make connections between science content and social justice, pushing the boundary of what is counted as science content by bringing social justice engagement to the center of science learning. We analyze lessons submitted by eighteen high school physics teachers who participated in a professional development program that supported the integration of equity into their science teaching. Three themes represent teachers' approach toward integrating social justice in their science lessons: (1) investigating the nature of science in specific science concepts and re-evaluating/redefining science concepts, (2) connecting students' everyday activities with science and global social justice issues, and (3) using science knowledge to engage with and advocate for social justice issues in students' local communities. 

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5. It can’t just be science: preservice elementary science teachers' ideas for teaching a social justice science issue

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-025-10253-7  

   Bautista, J. (June 2025, Cultural Studies of Science Education)

   Abstract Science is often perceived as an objective, apolitical, and static body of knowledge, rather than a set of practices for understanding how and why the world works. Teaching science through social justice science issues (SJSIs) can facilitate a more complex and nuanced understanding of science while supporting children to recognize how science can be a tool to either oppress or push against injustice. Integrating science and social justice movements, however, can be challenging for early career teachers, and particularly elementary teachers. For this qualitative study, five preservice elementary teachers grappled with how they might advise a colleague to teach science through one social justice science issue—a train derailment in a nearby state. In foregrounding an SJSI for a hypothetical lesson, teachers shared affordances and challenges to this work, illuminating and exploring three boundaries: (1) boundaries of what counts as science; (2) boundaries of one’s own knowledge; and (3) boundaries of one’s role as a teacher. I discuss implications for teacher education programs, with specific emphasis on supporting teachers to engage in transdisciplinary work and their own critical reflection. 

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