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Abstract Children who live in under-resourced communities and attend under-resourced schools deserve access to high-quality teachers and educational opportunities to support their success and well-being. This study emerged from a professional development (PD) for urban teachers working in such schools, to expand educational opportunities for elementary students through outdoor science teaching. Engaging frameworks of communities of practice (CoP) and critical pedagogy of place (CPP), this critical ethnographic study investigates how urban elementary teachers engage in discourse about critical issues of place. Additionally, the investigation seeks to understand how a CoP supports such discourse. The primary data for this study were multiple sets of researcher field notes collected from participant teachers during virtual spring and in-person summer PD. Over the course of the PD, participants shifted from viewing their outdoor teaching spaces with a deficit perspective to an asset-focused one. As they visited one another’s teaching sites, the CoP the teachers were a part of created opportunity for discourse about social justice linked to issues of place within their particular school neighborhoods. The ability of urban elementary teachers to connect social justice to issues of place and to the teaching of science has implications for countering the injustice that characterizes many urban communities in the USA and elsewhere. 

Abstract As distinct communities of practice (COP), science education research (SER) and environmental education research (EER) have both matured a great deal in recent decades, coming to include a greater diversity of theoretical perspectives, worldviews, and researcher and participant voices. In this paper, we present a view of theoretical inclusivity that promises a rich, robust research landscape for both EER and SER through the deliberate inclusion of non‐Western theories. This view has several components: it requires researchers to be explicit and clear about their theoretical stances and to use critical reflection to evaluate their research; and it encourages the field to expansively explore phenomena and issues using multiple epistemologies and continue to deepen their focus on developing praxis. EER's interdisciplinary and cross‐disciplinary nature make it uniquely positioned to model such inclusivity and move forward together with SER to create knowledge that is more robust and more just. We identify and discuss three key imperatives for the two fields to embrace this theoretical inclusivity now and the paths forward to support scholars doing work in both EER and SER and for the productive future of these fields.