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This manuscript is born from contemplating and exploring how it is that we see so little systemic change in STEM education after so many years of working toward it, including the insidious persistence of systems of oppression, and historical and generational exploitation that our current critical, social justice efforts in STEM teacher preparation programs are ineffective and ill‐equipped at changing or dismantling. Starting from an explanatory frame of Freire's conundrum of the oppressed, we theorize toward a more complex notion of ideological change. Through the novel reflexive discourse of aloving (self) critique, we interrogate our own individual failures to construct a better theoretical understanding of them. Using self‐reflections and other examples, we theorize an imperative of continuedideological growth and developmentto more authentically step forward in our STEM education equity and social justice work.

 

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. 

Addressing equity issues in science education requires a reorientation to how science students are advised and how science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, particularly science, is viewed. STEM education is often figuratively described as a pipeline containing students who leak out before reaching the nexus of their STEM education/career journey. The authors of this paper argue that STEM education must be viewed from an ecosystems perspective, where students interact with one another, their physical environment and cultural contexts, and other humans who can support them in becoming STEM professionals. Within this STEM ecosystem, many individuals have a pivotal role in supporting students as they learn and develop within the science field. These individuals, particularly advisors, must possess knowledge, beliefs, skills, and dispositions that help students cultivate a sense of belonging, engage them in critical thinking about their academic and career choices, and aid their identity development in learning as becoming in STEM professions. The authors describe who these individuals are, the roles they play, and also provide practical examples, using vignettes, of how advisors can support students of color pursuing science degrees and careers. Finally, recognizing that students' STEM advising ecosystem operates at any grade level or stage of life, the authors have organized the descriptive portion of this study according to the following levels elementary, secondary, undergraduate, graduate, and career. 

In this paper, we outline how science teachers might engage in the work of creating educational equity. While acknowledging the historical inherent inequities associated with issues of access, opportunities to engage in science learning for individuals of marginalized identities (e.g., BIPOC individuals and women), and achievement, we broaden this definition to include social justice as a framework by which we can develop opportunities for the fostering of students' affinity identities with science. To this end, we draw on theorizations of equity within educational research, specifically discussed as excellence, equality, fairness, a zero-sum game, and most recently, social justice. Additionally, we utilize McKinney de Royston and Nasir's (2017) Racialized Learning Ecologies framework. This framework provides a useful lens to notice the layers of (in)equity within education. We then extend this ecological model into science education and present three lenses (i.e., layers) through which equity operates within science teaching and learning. We conclude with a discussion of the practical implications of doing the work of equity, that is, recognizing, interpreting, and redressing inequity in science classrooms. Ultimately, we provide an actionable definition of equity that has the potential to facilitate transformative and socially just science teaching and learning. 

This paper's focus is on the “middle” of partnerships for equity in science education. Middle is used in a temporal sense, meaning the time after the general purposes and terms of working together have been set and before outcomes have been achieved. The middle of the partnership also represents people interacting, bounded around the edges, by their institutional roles, norms, resources, and priorities. As co-authors who had not previously collaborated (or even met in person), we approached the construction of this manuscript as a dialogue where we learn by sharing narrations of experiences and values and principles. We were inspired by the conversational book between Horton and Freire (1990) and specifically their discussion of “Is it possible to just teach biology?” (p. 102). In our conversation, we illustrate the ways in which partnerships may make justice-oriented science education possible. Our focus is on complementary and contradictory knowledges, and ways of knowing, institutional resources and constraints, and strategies for making transformative change. We explore the middle of partnerships as a series of opportunities for learning and growing, caring for one another, and building solidarity spaces together. 

This essay opens with a question about what science teaching would look like in a world where categorical seams of human diversity were not probabilistic determinants of science learning. After revisiting Hewson and Hewson's description of an “appropriate conception of science teaching,” I detail the ways in which the field of science education has advanced in the decades since that article's publication. Drawing upon Cohen's notion of teaching as an “impossible profession,” I highlight how conceptions of science teaching compete with other popular models of teaching and learning science. Fenstermacher and Richardson's distinction between successful teaching, and good teaching is then presented to demonstrate that even science teaching that is considered successful and good remains embedded in a constrained system where well-regarded classroom practices may still lead to accumulated negative consequences. The essay ends with a discussion of complexity and recursiveness in science teaching, an argument for science teaching that includes embedded understandings of that teaching and learning on the part of the students themselves, and suggestions for a revised conception of science teaching. 

For some time, scholars who are guided by critical theories and perspectives have called out how white supremacist ideologies and systemic racism work to (re)produce societal inequities and educational injustices across science learning contexts in the United States. Given the sociopolitical nature of society, schooling, and science education, it is important to address the racist and settled history of scientific disciplines and science education. To this end, we take an antiracist stance on science teaching and learning and seek to disrupt forms of systemic racism in science classrooms. Since teachers do much of the daily work of transforming science education for minoritized learners, we advocate for preparing teachers who understand what it means to engage in antiracist, justice-oriented science teaching. In this article, we share our framework for supporting preservice teachers in understanding, developing, and implementing antiracist teaching dispositions and instructional practices. In alignment with other researchers in teacher education who emphasize the importance of anchoring teacher education practice and research in prominent educational theory, we highlight the theories undergirding our approach to antiracist science teaching. We offer considerations for how researchers and science teacher educators can use this framework to transform science teacher education. 

In this paper, we synthesize existing literature on Culturally Relevant Science Teaching (CRST), more specifically the third tenet of CRST-developing students' sociopolitical or critical consciousness. While there is research on this third tenet, our review of the literature reveals that this tenet is understudied and underutilized. We offer our conceptual framework and an illustrative example to demonstrate how teachers can practically implement the third tenet of CRST to engage and empower students in science. We hope that the ideas and examples shared in this piece will help teachers foster students' sense of sociopolitical consciousness and advocacy within the walls of the classroom and beyond. We also urge researchers to continue producing research on this important topic so that practitioners can use this information to develop students' sociopolitical/critical awareness, reflections, and actions.