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This synthesis examines recent science education research on multilingual students’ experiences with language-rich science practices. Adopting a translanguaging lens, we explore how researchers’ language conceptualizations impact the science practices they study and the ways multilingual students are positioned. This analysis helps us understand the extent to which recent research is disrupting, or sustaining, minoritizing narratives about multilingual students and how they sensemake in science. Based on our findings, we suggest researchers: (1) reflect upon and expand their views of language, which will enable the field to develop more nuanced understandings of how language use across linguistic and multimodal resources permeates all science practices, and (2) consider how to expand multilingual students’ language repertoires for sensemaking while also valuing students’ existing language resources and practices. 

Research in science education with multilingual learners (MLs) has expanded rapidly. This rapid expansion can be situated within a larger dialogue about what it means to provide minoritized students with an equitable education. Whereas some conceptions of equity focus on ensuring all students have access to the knowledge, practices, and language normatively valued in K‐12 schools (equity as access), increasingly prominent conceptions focus on transforming those knowledge, practices, and language in ways that center minoritized students and their communities (equity as transformation). In this article, we argue that conceptions of equity provide a useful lens for understanding emerging research in science education with MLs and for charting a research agenda. We begin by tracing how conceptions of equity have evolved in parallel across STEM and multilingual education. Then, we provide an overview of recent developments from demographic, theoretical, and policy perspectives. In the context of these developments, we provide a conceptual synthesis of emerging research by our team of early‐career scholars in three areas: (a) learning, (b) assessment, and (c) teacher education. Within each area, we unpack the research efforts in terms of how they attend to equity as access while pushing toward equity as transformation. Finally, we propose a research agenda for science education with MLs that builds on and extends these efforts. We close by offering recommendations for making this research agenda coherent and impactful: (a) being explicit about our conceptions of equity, (b) paying attention to the interplay of structure and agency, and (c) promoting interdisciplinary collaboration. 

These narratives explore what it might entail to begin school–university partnerships towards the goal of transformative social changes through the voices of two women scholars of color. Using two school–university partnerships as focal cases, we unpack the complexity, tensions, and possibilities that arise through collaborations driven by the objective to promote new and more just forms of science learning within public schools. In this article, we use three key dimensions of participatory design research (namely, critical historicity, power, and relationality) as analytical lenses through which to reflect upon school–university partnerships that we are in the beginning stages of forming. Through this methodology, we shed light on: (a) the historical genealogies of equity-oriented work and (b) the tensions that we encountered as we strived for beginning partnerships with K-12 schools. These narratives unveil the dynamic and contentious nature of forming school–university partnerships that always occurs within a sociopolitical landscape impacted by intersecting and powered identity markers, including those around race, gender, language, culture, and status. We provide specific recommendations for supporting education researchers who aspire to transform the learning of sciences at schools through a collaborative and sustainable partnership. These recommendations include ideas around how to collectively generate goals with schools centered on transformative science learning; attention to the role of language and race in shaping partnership role-remediation; and creating infrastructure for developing school–university partnerships toward transformative social changes, including financial, human and relational resources, as well as new forms of recognition systems.