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Children are often denied science education that engages their emotions and multiple identities. This study focused on ways in which embodied arts‐based experiences offer opportunities for such engagement in pedagogical efforts associated with justice‐centered science. The conceptual framework that informed the study considers the body as a site of learning, embraces social justice in science education and engages with the dialectical relationship between various structures and children's agency, and frames the transdisciplinarity of imagination. The instrumental case study centered on a fifth‐grade class of Latinx students in an urban public school, as they grappled with lead contamination and peoples' rights to clean water through an embodied, arts‐based pedagogy in their science class. Analysis of video clips, student work, and other artifacts pointed to three findings on how children engaged with justice‐centered science learning via arts‐based embodied activities. Through perspective‐taking in the dramatizing, children engaged with science ideas intertwined with sociopolitical understandings. Through centering emotions that drama afforded, children experienced empathy and solidarity with others affected by environmental injustices. Through imagined and enacted participation in struggles that the embodiments necessitated, children engaged in actions to resist injustices. These findings suggest that exploring children's arts‐based embodied meaning making in science is a robust area of inquiry. Furthermore, the findings compel researchers and practitioners to consider emotions in performing arts, and how they can deepen engagement in, and exploration of, justice‐centered science. Recommendations emerged for practitioners poised to explore justice‐centered science with children through the arts. 

A team of literacy, science, and theatre educators have been working to engage children in an urban public school system in the United States through embodied performances, where students embody and dramatise science ideas. This study focuses on one fourth‐grade classroom when instruction was done remotely due to Covid‐19. Children in the class were asked to compose videos of themselves acting out and/or exploring science phenomena and concepts, and we analysed the affordances of these multimodal compositions. We situate the need for this study in claims from the Next Generation Science Standards that literacy skills are necessary to build and communicate science knowledge. In doing so, we center social semiotics perspectives that conceive of composition broadly as production‐oriented processes drawing from various semiotic resources. The multimodal compositions in Mr. M's science class included both primarily embodied compositions and primarily digital compositions, and we elaborate on one focal example of each in the findings. Intertwined affordances of the focal children and their classmates' multimodal science compositions include opportunities to creatively engage with and negotiate science ideas, to draw from personal and social knowledge during meaning‐making, and to intentionally make rhetorical choices. 

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine playful practices in the science video composition of a fourth-grader. Design/methodology/approach With an analytic interest in “chasing the theory of muchness” (Thiel, 2015a) that describes distinctive moments of affective energies in playful learning, the authors explored a child’s video in which a food chain is dramatized. Findings The authors identified how muchness manifested in/through her compositional play. Originality/value The potential of playful composing and dramatizing to support meaning-making across contexts and disciplines is discussed.