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There is a growing body of scholarship in science education that attends to the role of emotions and affect as shaping youths’ negotiation of and experiences with disciplinary science practices towards more expansive understandings of how youth make-meaning around science phenomena. This study builds on this growing scholarship by examining how power and positionality shapes emerging emotional configurations in classroom spaces. Grounded in a larger study involving implementing a justice-oriented middle-school biology unit, we utilized interaction analysis methods to examine how care for the well-being of the ‘other’ co-operatively emerged as an epistemic ideal when creating a community ethnography and was shaped by de/settling powered differentials; disciplinary practices; and youth and facilitators’ powered positionings in relation with macro sociopolitical worlds. This work contributes to our collective understanding of sense-making in science classrooms by nuancing the complex nature of engaging in allied sociopolitical struggles in explicitly justice-oriented learning spaces.
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This content will become publicly available on January 3, 2026
“That's Just Gonna Make Them Upset”: Youth Authoring Emerging Epistemic Ideals Through Rightful Presence
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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- Award ID(s):
- 2000515
- PAR ID:
- 10616987
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Science Education
- ISSN:
- 0036-8326
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- science education affect epistemic biology middle school
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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