A growing body of research demonstrates the value of asking students to write about science for authentic purposes. But which purposes--and, just as importantly, whose purposes--count as authentic? In this theoretical article, we review several conceptions of authentic purpose drawn from science education and literacy education and use these to…

Education by and for Indigenous peoples needs to focus on and honor the life-affirming notions of land- and place-based connections, our individual and collective responsibilities, reciprocity, and relationships. In todays' school settings, redefining what "success" looks like as well as supporting Indigenous identities are critical to…

This paper discusses the value of a Freirean liberatory perspective in community colleges, countering the traditional "second chance" or "social reproduction" viewpoints attributed by scholars to the education offered in these institutions, emphasizing its vital need in science and healthcare careers education. I explore the…

This paper makes the case that love, in particular a lover's discourse, is regularly excluded from the work we do in higher education. As educators, we are seldom empowered to reach for a discourse of love, nor are we taught to embody love explicitly in our work. This doesn't mean that love doesn't exist in education, but rather something more…

The sociopolitical turn in science education calls for transgressing/trespassing boundaries, troubling the hermeticism of the field that has avoided seeing itself under the lens of social, critical, or philosophical theories. As such, the purpose of this article is to show a provocative way in which I organised my thoughts and analysis during my…

This paper focuses on the undergraduate experiences in computer sciences (CS) disciplines of eight Native women and two-spirit undergraduates and how their values and experiences around the communal goal of giving back enable them to persist in computing. The paper draws from a one-year study that included participants across the U.S.A from…

Public debate often centers on issues that affect our lives and which reflect interests of various social groups and scientific communities, leading to controversies about what we may call socially acute questions (SAQs). In this paper we focus on two SAQs linked to the dominant model of meat production and consumption in Western countries, namely…

This study examines and describes how various online remote laboratory courses, necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, were implemented at Hankuk University in Korea in 2020. We compared four general undergraduate laboratory courses, one each for physics, chemistry, biology, and earth science, and two major-level laboratory courses taught during…

This study describes the use of a pictorial-based approach to the exploration of minority preservice elementary teachers' (PSETs) professional conceptions about science teaching and learning. Pictorial representations instead of written reports on prior learning experiences with science were used as a data-gathering tool. In this study, we…

Higher education physics has long been a field with a disproportionately skewed representation in terms of gender, class, and ethnicity. Responding to this challenge, this study explores the trajectories of "unexpected" (i.e., demographically under-represented) students into higher education physics. Based on timeline-guided life-history…

As the coronavirus pandemic unfolded, the use of the term "Chinavirus" to refer to the virus that causes COVID-19 had societal consequences, resulting in discrimination against individuals of Asian descent. In this study of the language used when talking about COVID-19, we used an emergent thematic analysis to explore the potential for…

In this study, we explored (a) how Latina undergraduate students negotiated their multiple identities while participating in a research internship designed to create spaces that counter master narratives, and the forms of cultural wealth that were implicated in these identity negotiations, and (b) ways in which the various elements of the research…

With the global pandemic educators have had to move their courses to virtual spaces, and this quick change has brought up concerns, especially in STEM education where there are ongoing discussions of adapting laboratories and shifting lecture and assessment practices to online learning. One issue that has become more pressing, beyond the financial…

Native Americans are the least represented population in science fields. In recent years, undergraduate and graduate level summer research programs that aimed to increase the number of Native Americans in science have made some progress. As new programs are designed, key characteristics that address science self-efficacy and science identity and…

After reviewing the main discussions on scientific explanation in the literature, this paper outlines a particular approach to explanations based on sociocultural analysis. The aim is to provide a base for discussing explanations as cultural tools in science education. Drawing on studies of collective remembering, this paper focuses on parallels…