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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. 

This study investigates research and instructional practices that support rightful familial presence in STEM to address the continued racial/class inequities in STEM learning. We ask: What practices grounded in research-practice-partnerships support rightful familial presence, and how do these practices facilitate capital movement between families and schools for STEM teaching and learning? 

This international collection of papers examines the many ways teachers exercise agency in light of the challenging realities they and their students face to create caring, engaging and transformative learning environments. The teachers in these studies exercise agency in various ways — as individuals, collectives, and fluid inter-professional and personal collaborations — to construct their professional identities and contribute to social change in their schools and society. Across these papers, we also find empirical evidence about the reflexive relationship between individual agency and social structures in shaping each other. 

Since spring of 2020, our ‘new normal’ world pivoted towards online spaces. This changed where formal teaching and learning interactions unfolded, and also shifted the conditions for participation in teaching, learning and research activities calling into question how and where inequitable power dynamics are (re)produced in these ‘new’ spaces. In this paper, we reflect on the affordances and constraints of community-engaged research with middle school youth in online virtual design meeting ‘rooms.’ Drawing on critical postmodern and queer feminist constructions of space, the university researchers explicitly worked towards Rightful Presence when structuring and facilitating the online design meeting room. We argue that virtual spaces are not neutral and are shaped through settled power dynamics that can further (re)produce inequitable conditions for participating and/or open new possibilities for disrupting settled adult-youth powered relations by both youth and adults. 

Abstract This study explores ways to support girls of color in forming their senses of selves in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) during the middle school years. Guided by social practice theory, we analyzed a large data set of survey responses (n = 1,821) collected at five middle schools in low‐income communities across four states in the United States. Analyses focus on the extent to which key constructs that inform girls’ development of senses of self and relations among those indicators of STEM identities varied by their race/ethnicity. Though the means of indicators sometimes varied across racial/ethnic groups, multigroup structural equation modeling analyses indicate no significant racial/ethnic differences in the relations of STEM identities, suggesting that similar supports would be equally effective for all girls during the middle school years. Girls’ self‐perception in relation to science was the strongest predictor of their identification with STEM‐related careers, and this self‐perception was positively and distinctively associated with their experiences with science at home, outside of school, and in school science classes. This study argues for strategically expanding girls’ experiences with science acrossmultiplesettings during middle school in a way that increases their positive self‐perception in and with STEM.