An urgent goal for science teacher educators is to prepare teachers to teach science in meaningful ways to youth from nondominant backgrounds. This preparation is challenging, for it asks teachers to critically examine how their pedagogical practices might adaptively respond to students and to science. It asks, essentially, for new teachers to…

In this rejoinder to Bryan Brown and John Reveles, we highlight the facts that (a) sociocultural theories of learning do not go far enough because they fail to address a number of issues and (b) we require concepts such as power and positionality to understand science learning.

In this manuscript we examine how two students develop and express agency in and through high school physics. We tell the stories of two youth from a low-income, urban community to elucidate the important components of critical science agency in a physics context, and to situate a set of claims about how youth develop and express this concept.…

Dr. Sreyashi Jhumki Basu was a scholar committed to equity and social justice in science education who passed away in December 2008. In this essay, I describe Jhumki's research and the call to action her life's work has laid out for the science education community. In particular, I draw attention to the role of critical science agency in learning…