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Abstract Multilingual youth, from nondominant communities, are often denied critical opportunities for engagement in robust sensemaking due to deficit‐based perspectives and linguistic hierarchies. To advance equity, it is important to recognizeallyouth as epistemic agents and facilitate opportunities to take on intellectual positions. Drawing on translanguaging theory and critical sociocultural learning perspectives, we examine how a monolingual science teacher employed translanguaging as a dignity‐affirming stance, pedagogical practice, and disciplinary tool, providing multilingual girls with intellectual positions to engage in robust sensemaking. Using video‐interactional analysis, we explore a case of sophisticated sensemaking orchestrated by the teacher's discursive and embodied moves, following the girls' translanguaging practices and disciplinary ideas. Our findings demonstrate how a teacher's translanguaging stance, enacted as a pedagogical practice and disciplinary tool, supported him in developing interpretive power, revealing the multilingual girls' social, cognitive, and communicative brilliances. 

Science learning is not limited to knowledge and skills. This research draws on the expansive theories of learning, which recognize students’ identities and their cultural and epistemic agencies as critical resources for learning. To this end, we examine how positioning students as cultural and epistemic agents helps them to recruit their diverse cultural, epistemic, and linguistic resources and in turn support students’ developing identities.