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Young learners today are constantly influenced by AI recommendations, from media choices to social connections. The resulting "filter bubble" can limit their exposure to diverse perspectives, which is especially problematic when they are not aware this manipulation is happening or why. To address the need to support youth AI literacy, we developed "BeeTrap", a mobile Augmented Reality (AR) learning game designed to enlighten young learners about the mechanisms and the ethical issue of recommendation systems. Transformative Experience model was integrated into learning activities design, focusing on making AI concepts relevant to students’ daily experiences, facilitating a new understanding of their digital world, and modeling real-life applications. Our pilot study with middle schoolers in a community-based program primarily investigated how transformative structured AI learning activities affected students’ understanding of recommendation systems and their overall conceptual, emotional, and behavioral changes toward AI. 

This paper is an introduction to and a synthesis of three papers in this issue written by scholars deeply committed to partnering with communities to understand and enact what it means to realize transformational ends in and through science education. Partnering for justice must be a conversation, a work in progress, and a critical examination that leads to intentional and careful forward movement. It is a beautiful effort at flattening power hierarchies so diverse voices and expertise can be interwoven in service of youth and communities who have been invisibilized and marginalized. Committed to realizing new, hope-filled futures, the three pairs of authors use their experiences and expertise to shed light on the work of partnering using a temporal lens: considerations related to the beginnings, middles, and endings of partnering, each of which requires special intentionality and care. Together the authors share core overlapping tenets with other critical scholars that could be considered a partnering for justice epistemology. This epistemology underscores how importantly different learning through partnering for justice is from traditional notions of academic research. I close the paper by sharing lessons learned from my own 20-plus years of partnering for justice, using the tenets of partnering for justice epistemology as a lens. 

Abstract We find ourselves at a time when the need for transformation in science education is aligning with opportunity. Significant science education resources, namely the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) framework, need an intentional aim of centering social justice for minoritized communities and youth as well as practices to enact it. While NGSS and AST provide concrete guidelines to support deep learning, revisions are needed to explicitly promote social justice. In this study, we sought to understand how a commitment to social justice, operationalized through culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, Culturally sustaining pedagogies and our futures.The Educational Forum, 2021; 85, pp. 364–376), might shape the AST framework to promote more critical versions of teaching science for equity. Through a qualitative multi‐case study, we observed three preservice teacher teams engaged in planning, teaching, and debriefing a 6‐day summer camp in a rural community. Findings showed that teachers shaped the AST sets of practices in ways that sustained local culture and addressed equity aims: anchoring scientific study in phenomena important to community stakeholders; using legitimizing students' stories by both using them to plan the following lessons and as data for scientific argumentation; introducing local community members as scientific experts, ultimately supporting a new sense of pride and advocacy for their community; and supporting students in publicly communicating their developing scientific expertise to community stakeholders. In shaping the AST framework through culturally sustaining pedagogy, teachers made notable investments: developing local networks; learning about local geography, history, and culture; building relationships with students; adapting lessons to incorporate students' ideas; connecting with community stakeholders to build scientific collaborations; and preparing to share their work publicly with the community. Using these findings, we offer a justice‐centered ambitious science teaching (JuST) framework that can deliver the benefits of a framework of practices while also engaging in the necessarily more critical elements of equity work.