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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. 

Supporting minoritized students’ participation in a science requires designing expansive notions of what counts as doing and learning science. We present the design of a middle-school biology unit about stress and body system interactions that challenges the boundaries of disciplined science and promoting social change making through consequential learning. Four core axiological commitments shaped the design of the unit: a) expanding disciplinary practice by entangling mind, body, and environment; b) supporting students’ rightful participation and expertise; c) recognizing the environment as politicized across scales; and d) supporting social change through allied political struggle. We describe how we embodied these commitments in the unit design and how they played out in the context of a 7th grade urban science classroom. This work provides another example of consequential learning environments and contributes to the theory and practice underlying their design. 

Modeling science phenomena serves as a tool to support science practices, where classroom environments and youths’ relations with each other and those in positions of power shape how the activity unfolds and what models are created. Grounded in a relational ontology, we build on justice-oriented approaches to studying youths’ learning towards their Rightful Presence by examining the expansive and political ways of knowing youth draw on while modeling. We followed a group of four middle-school youth and traced the human-human and human-more-than-human powered relations that shaped their models of short and long-term stress created across two multi-day lessons. We illustrate how models emerged as more-than-human entities with identities shaped through youths’ intra-group, student-teacher, and human-more-than-human relations, entangled with who and how youth are in and with this world. We also argue ceding power to youth to re-author their and their models’ rights supported more expansive understandings of youths’ learning. 

There is a growing body of scholarship in science education that attends to the role of emotions and affect as shaping youths’ negotiation of and experiences with disciplinary science practices towards more expansive understandings of how youth make-meaning around science phenomena. This study builds on this growing scholarship by examining how power and positionality shapes emerging emotional configurations in classroom spaces. Grounded in a larger study involving implementing a justice-oriented middle-school biology unit, we utilized interaction analysis methods to examine how care for the well-being of the ‘other’ co-operatively emerged as an epistemic ideal when creating a community ethnography and was shaped by de/settling powered differentials; disciplinary practices; and youth and facilitators’ powered positionings in relation with macro sociopolitical worlds. This work contributes to our collective understanding of sense-making in science classrooms by nuancing the complex nature of engaging in allied sociopolitical struggles in explicitly justice-oriented learning spaces. 

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.