Increasingly diverse classrooms and growing numbers of second-language learners raise questions about educational equity, particularly as there is a wide span in science performance between peers with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. This indicates systematic inequalities. Partnerships between teachers and researchers are recognised as important for transforming practice, yet the relational dynamics within such collaborations deserve closer attention. This study examines a teacher–researcher conversation following co-teaching of a dictogloss activity in a diverse sixth-grade science class. The study draws on Freire's theories of dialogue, unfinishedness, and emancipatory education, together with the concept of borderlands as spaces where different cultures meet, and Ricoeur’s framework of recognition, comprising identification, self-recognition, and mutual recognition. This combined theoretical lens allows the study to examine both the broader emancipatory aim of collaboration and the finer-grained interactional processes through which recognition unfolds. Using an inductive, interpretive approach, the study analyses a transcribed dialogue between the teacher and researcher. Findings reveal how the teacher's initial frustration with a researcher-designed task evolved through unsolicited adaptations, sustained questioning, and negotiated disagreement into mutual recognition. The borderland collaboration showed signs of an operationalisation of emancipatory teaching practice through iterative confrontation and rework rather than through a single, "correct" task design. The study concludes that inhabiting, rather than resolving, tension between teachers and researchers offers a necessary path towards genuinely reciprocal, emancipatory collaboration. Thus, disagreement should not be avoided, but rather be situated as a space of opportunity for transforming established teaching patterns.
Epistemic risk is inherent in the practice of science and can be intimidating for students in classrooms building their science skills. We argue here that science learning must be designed to scaffold epistemic risk that supports students in social knowledge construction. Through the case study of a group of four middle school students and their class working to explain the relationship between earthquakes and volcanoes in relation to the larger theory of plate tectonics, we illustrate students’ engagement in epistemic practices and the scaffolds that enabled them to fully participate in these practices. Our analysis suggests that scaffolding in participant structures, more knowledgeable others, and organizational tools supported students in fully engaging in the epistemic practices of science. Though epistemic risk taking is critical to students’ engagement in epistemic practices, there is a need to attend to the interpersonal and socioemotional influences on students’ epistemic agency, attending to students’ sense of belonging, connectedness, and safety. We advocate for the intentional design of epistemic tools that purposefully include supports for students to navigate epistemic risk.
This is an open letter from a Latina science teacher to Latina science teachers. I offer advice for Latina science teachers who are new to the field and those with more experience. I offer advice for bilingual science teachers who bring our languages into the classroom and for those of us who strive to be transformative. For the new science teacher, you may be young to the field, but your energy and experiences are needed. And for the veteran science teacher, I invite you to be a culturally responsive mentor. To the bilingual science teacher, I urge you to keep on using your bilingualism to not only teach but also to othermother your students. Finally, to the transformative science teacher, I invite you to pull away from hegemonic science curriculum and draw from your student’s lived experiences. I wrote this letter using science education literature and my lived experiences as a Latina student, and a high school chemistry teacher. I wrote the letter that I needed to have as I navigated academia as a learner and educator of Color. With this letter, dear Latina science teacher, I hope you feel seen.
This study explores the interdisciplinary nature of the Resource Recovery Project, a US National Science Foundation funded International Research Experience for Students (IRES) initiative addressing wastewater management and resource recovery in an ecotourism-dependent region impacted by global climate change. Using a phenomenological approach, we examined how the professional biographies and disciplinary orientations of four principal investigators (PIs)—two environmental engineers and two applied medical anthropologists—shaped the project’s interdisciplinary nature. Data were collected through group discussions and individual interviews with the PIs, which were then analyzed using open and axial coding and thematic analysis. Findings reveal that while the project aimed to integrate engineering and anthropology to develop culturally appropriate and sustainable sanitation, there were challenges to achieving true interdisciplinarity. The collaboration was more successful in providing students with research experiences that incorporated methods from both engineering and anthropology than in integrating both the substantive and syntactic structures of the disciplines that would result in cognitive advances. Implications include the need for intentional co-design, early involvement of all disciplines, and institutional support to foster true interdisciplinarity for students’ research apprenticeships.
Human exceptionalism pervades theories of love from the sciences through cultural studies. Consequently, research on love across the disciplines almost always centralizes human experiences and human expressions of love while the potential for plant, animal, and earthly love remains largely overlooked. Even in environmental education, humans are urged to demonstrate more love and care for more-than-human kin but rarely asked to consider kin experiences and expressions of love—whether they exist, how they develop, and what we might learn from them. In this theoretical and exploratory analysis, I draw on multidisciplinary research to illustrate how this unchecked bias may reduce human capacity for love both conceptually and biologically while reinforcing environmentally problematic assumptions. Do plants, animals, and the Earth itself love? Anthropocentric assumptions to this question may result, in part, from the individualistic and materially oriented ontological orientation pervasive in Western cultures and science. Here, I investigate common framings of love both within and outside that orientation, including neurobiological love; heart-centered love; love and attachment theory; love as an action; love as intentional support; eco-spiritual love; and the convergence point between diverse theological conceptions of love. By engaging these multiple, overlapping theories and reorienting them to a deeply relational ontology, I expand their application to trees, crows, octopuses, fungi, ecosystems, and beyond. I argue that an ecological rather than anthropocentric definition of love, rooted in a deeply relational ontology, could potentiate significant epistemological and scientific expansion. Furthermore, when viewed from an ecological rather than anthropocentric perspective, ecosystems and the Earth itself may be conceptualized as fundamentally and predominantly loving.
