Background: We examine the development of youth sociopolitical consciousness and agency in an eighth-grade science classroom as students of color engage in critical speculative design activities, exploring the multi-scalar, racial realities and possibilities of the science and engineering of pervasive digital technologies--specifically involving…

Background: Everyday digital technologies play an important role in mediating human activity that is socio-political and humanizing. The everyday cyborg engages in speculative fabulation that is about fantastical new world-making in times of multiple crises. The work presented in this article builds on previous projects that have examined how…

Background: Studies of group creativity have focused on adults acting in professional settings, with less attention paid to how adolescents collaborate in groups in creative activities. Building on sociocultural perspectives on imagination as a complex capacity in adolescence, this study examines students' creative-imagining processes and the role…

Background: Art making is a personal and social process in which learners make meaning for themselves and audiences through the production of artifacts. In classrooms, this personal and social process is made concrete through dialogue. Methods: This paper presents an illustrative case study of how sixth-grade student, Jo, developed voice through…

Background: Fiber crafts occupy a vital position in technology innovation and present a promising space for computer science education, which continues to face lopsided participation. It remains unclear whether and how fiber crafts can become a context for computational learning and what role different materials play with the risk to miss…

Background: Groupwork is a desirable activity in mathematics classrooms for the opportunity it creates for collaborative reasoning and interdependence. Correlations between group-level processes and outcomes have helped characterize the features of more successful groups, but group-level constructs can obscure how students negotiate ideas. This…

Background: Teachers need to make sense of curricular materials and design instruction to ensure students will be positioned to pursue their own arc of inquiry in curriculum enactment. Whole-group discussions are crucial opportunities for curricular sensemaking, yet planning and enactment can be challenging. Methods: We used a single, revelatory…

Background: To attend to the social production of girls of color in science through the lens of history in person and local contentious practice, we propose a relational and nonrepresentational reading of STEM pathways. We invoke the conceptual lenses of wayfaring, knots, and meshwork to highlight the infinite ways of figuring science and becoming…

Background: Recent alternative concepts of school knowledge emphasize knowledge creation via networks of learning around real-world phenomena. We studied entrepreneurship education as an example of new epistemic activity which opens institutional boundaries for active engagement with society in learning. Methods: We used a case-study strategy and…

Most research on mathematical play and learning is focused on early childhood. This study examines how mathematical play and learning manifest in older children in a mathematical videogame designed by the first author, "Rolly's Adventure." We examined how players experienced mathematical play as they played "Rolly's Adventure,"…

Background: Learning to program and success in computer science requires persistence in the face of challenges. This study contributes to research on the social context of learning by describing how children's peer interactions can support or hinder the pair's problem solving on the computer. Methods: Video recordings from eight pairs of middle…

Open large-scale datasets (LSDS) and data visualization technologies are new cultural tools that have potential to inform public dialogue and learning about important socioeconomic and scientific matters, particularly if the data is used to consider both personal and shared experiences. This paper reports on a design study in which diverse middle…

Educators aim to equip students with learning strategies they can apply when approaching new problems on their own. Teaching design-thinking strategies may support this goal. A first test would show that the strategies are good for learning and that students spontaneously transfer them beyond classroom instruction. To examine this, we introduce…

The current study examined the effectiveness of self-explanation prompts, visual signaling cues, and a combination of the two features on middle school students' (N = 202) algebra learning. Also explored were the differential effects of features for students with faulty conceptual knowledge (evidenced by a higher prevalence of making errors during…

Opportunities to learn in consequential ways are shaped by the historicized injustices students encounter in relation to participation in STEM and schooling. In this article, it is argued that the construct of rightful presence, and the coconstructed "making present" practices that give rise to moments of rightful presence, is 1 way to…