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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. 

In this essay, we share historical and structural components of mentoring within institutions of higher education and grapple with technical and moral obligations of support. We argue for more humanizing approaches that embed personal, social, and cultural aspects of mentoring, and seek to disrupt the purposes of mentoring, and for whom? Using a critical approach, we promote justice-oriented and equity-driven models of mentoring that account for excessive teaching loads and service commitments for faculty at minority-serving institutions and Black and Brown faculty at predominantly White institutions. Current promotion and tenure publish or perish models neglect the intellectual and scholarly contributions made through teaching and service and therefore hold the same level of expectations for engagement in and dissemination of research. We share our own stories as Faculty of Color navigating institutional structures during the promotion and tenure process, while also negotiating incongruent cultures of our personal and professional lives. Furthermore, we address the need for mentoring and networking within exclusionary spaces to support the productivity and critical research agendas of Black and Brown faculty that often challenge the white heteronormative cultures of our institutions, professional organizations, peer-reviewed journals, and prestigious funding mechanisms. Implications of this essay include an acknowledgment of oppressive systems that early-career Black and Brown faculty often navigate and a call for diverse mentoring programs and supports that conform with and validate our lives and needs. Furthermore, we provide recommendations on evidence-based resources and approaches that are available to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics faculty and science educators. 

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. 

These narratives explore what it might entail to begin school–university partnerships towards the goal of transformative social changes through the voices of two women scholars of color. Using two school–university partnerships as focal cases, we unpack the complexity, tensions, and possibilities that arise through collaborations driven by the objective to promote new and more just forms of science learning within public schools. In this article, we use three key dimensions of participatory design research (namely, critical historicity, power, and relationality) as analytical lenses through which to reflect upon school–university partnerships that we are in the beginning stages of forming. Through this methodology, we shed light on: (a) the historical genealogies of equity-oriented work and (b) the tensions that we encountered as we strived for beginning partnerships with K-12 schools. These narratives unveil the dynamic and contentious nature of forming school–university partnerships that always occurs within a sociopolitical landscape impacted by intersecting and powered identity markers, including those around race, gender, language, culture, and status. We provide specific recommendations for supporting education researchers who aspire to transform the learning of sciences at schools through a collaborative and sustainable partnership. These recommendations include ideas around how to collectively generate goals with schools centered on transformative science learning; attention to the role of language and race in shaping partnership role-remediation; and creating infrastructure for developing school–university partnerships toward transformative social changes, including financial, human and relational resources, as well as new forms of recognition systems. 

Concepts in science education such as “science identity” and “science capital” are informed by dominant epistemological and ontological positions, which translate into assumptions about what counts as science and whose science counts. In this theoretical paper we draw on decolonial and antiracist perspectives to examine these assumptions in light of the heterogeneous onto-epistemological and axiological values, cultural perspectives, and contributions of nondominant groups, and specifically of those who have been historically marginalized based on their gender, race, ethnic, age, and/or social class identity. Building on these arguments, we critique deficit-based approaches to science teaching, learning, and research, including those that focus on systemic injustice, yet leave intact dominant framings of the scientific enterprise, which are exclusionary and meritocratic. As an alternative, we offer a design of science teaching and learning for the pluriverse—“a world where many worlds fit”. This alternative allows us to reconstruct science and science-related “outcomes,” such as identity, in the service of cultural, epistemic, and linguistic pluralism. We close the paper with the idea that because mainstream theories reproduce deficit framings and educational injustices, we must engage with decolonial1 theories of pluriversality and discuss different onto-epistemologies to be able to grapple with existing social, racial, environmental injustices, and land-based devastations. 

This essay is the second paper of a related three-paper set that examines, critiques, and offers responses to current conceptions of academic advising within P-20+ STEM education. In this essay, we offer a review of the current understandings of academic advising and its existing limitations with meaningfully supporting Black and Brown STEM learners. As a response to this critique, we call for a critical-ecological perspective to STEM academic advising, leveraging Phenomenological Variant Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST) as the conceptual background for this approach. We then provide a set of guiding principles for educators to consider when taking a PVEST approach to academic advising. In providing these guiding principles, we situate the third paper in the set as those authors offer specific examples for how this approach can be implemented across the P-20+ STEM spectrum. 

Across a broad range of disciplines, research has found that inequity is systemic in the journal review process. Collectively, however, this study does not specifically examine racial inequity. Moreover, literature on the peer review process in science education, in particular, does not foreground equity as a subject of study. The present study aims to address this void by examining racial equity in the peer review process with a specific focus on journals in science education. Data are collected from lead editors of major science education journals through the form of interviews, focus groups, and critical arts-based methods. The two research questions driving data collection are (a) In what ways does the science education journal peer review process promote racial equity? and (b) How are science education journal editors’ perceptions of racial inequity reflected in the peer review process? McNair and colleagues’ racial equity framework informs the explorations of journal review in science education from the lead editors’ perspectives. From our findings, we offer four suggestions for moving toward greater racial equity in the science education peer review process. 

In this essay, I explore some of the insights provided in a set of three manuscripts that focus on centering equity in peer review, authored by Bancroft, Ryoo and Miles, Nkrumah and Mutegi, and Marshall and Salter. I consider various aspects of their arguments, highlighting implications for the procedures and norms of journals and funding organizations and questions for further consideration. Drawing on their findings and analyses, I discuss various recommendations, such as the need to change the rules and norms of peer review to be more equitable, to ensure that reviews are free from race, ethnicity, gender, and other kinds of identity-related biases, to work towards equitable distribution of the resources, such as advising, mentoring, and valuable feedback, that support fair reviewing, and to establish criteria and rubrics that support research that is conducted in collaboration with communities marginalized in science education. In addition, I raise issues for further consideration, including the evolving relationship between “equity” and “merit” with regard to peer review and the need for centering equity in ways that allow for discussion, debate, and development of the field.