Research suggests that translanguaging can be transformative for teaching and learning by making students' diverse linguistic resources a meaningful part of classroom discourse. Building on this study, researchers have explored how translanguaging practices can support learning in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), primarily in the context of bilingual classrooms. However, in the United States, most students learn in English‐dominant classrooms. In response, researchers and educators have begun to explore strategies for inviting and leveraging translanguaging in English‐dominant classrooms, primarily focusing on literacy learning. Less is known about supporting translanguaging in English‐dominant STEM classrooms, particularly with monolingual teachers. In an English‐dominant sixth‐grade STEM classroom engaging in a 9‐week ecology unit, we explored how scientific modeling could not only provide a context for inviting translanguaging, but how it could also provide a setting where modeling and translanguaging could be experienced as analogous meaning‐making practices. Our findings demonstrate that translanguaging has the potential to support new kinds of learning in English‐dominant STEM classrooms, not only about STEM content and practices but also about what counts as legitimate and valuable participation in these spaces.

An agent-based approach to integrating computing in secondary-school science courses.

Computer science (CS) is becoming an increasingly diverse domain. This paper reports on an initiative designed to introduce underrepresented populations to computing using an eclectic, multifaceted approach. As part of a yearlong computing course, students engage in Maker activities, participatory simulations, and computing projects that foreground the social and collaborative aspects of CS. Collectively, these activities are designed to introduce learners to the growing diversity of what CS looks like in the 21st century. This paper lays out the practical and theoretical motivations for the Computational Thinking for Girls (CT4G) project, specifically highlighting the use of Making through physical and social computing as ways to engage students in CS. A snapshot of one activity from the program is provided-Wearing the Web-in which students use open-hardware programmable badges to explore the underlying structure and technology that enables the Internet. Data from the first year of the CT4G program are presented to show the positive effects that this diverse introduction to CS is having on the students with respect to their attitudes toward CS.

Research about modeling emphasizes the importance of heterogeneity in science learning. At the same time, a growing body of scholarship seeks curricular pathways for epistemic and representational convergence. In response to this tension, we propose two constructs: heterogeneity-seeking curricula and commitments. Heterogeneity-seeking curricula emphasize generating and valuing multiple representations of phenomena, offering an image of science that foregrounds messy, nonlinear aspects of learning. Commitments parallel epistemic cognition research by focusing on values that shape students’ modeling; however, rather than looking for disciplinary practices in students’ modeling, commitments take students’ values as a starting point, mapping them to disciplinary resources not typically foregrounded in science education. Using a lens of commitments, we analyze six implementations of a heterogeneity-seeking 6th grade modeling curriculum, and we compare the lens of commitments to the lens of epistemic ideals. Then, we show that, in this context, commitments functioned like epistemic ideals by acting as evaluative resources during modeling. However, commitments also extended beyond this role by helping students ask and explore questions that were not anticipated by the curriculum, problematizing a view of phenomena as objective and external to students’ modeling work and showing them instead to be a production of the classroom’s multidimensional modeling discourse.

Attending to emotion in science classrooms can expand the range of resources valued for science learning, and it can offer insights into students' investigations. However, research that characterizes emotion as a part of disciplinary science learning is relatively nascent. In response, we explore the dynamic relationships between feelings, sensemaking, and practices in a sixth‐grade STEM classroom, guided by (a) Kimmerer's (2013) account of braiding Eurocentric disciplinary science with other resources, including feelings, and (b) Vea's (2020) framework of emotional configurations. We analyze data from multiple iterations of a 9‐week curriculum about guppies' survival needs and the dynamics of ecosystems, illustrating how students' feelings and their sensemaking through practices involving observation were intertwined in generative and mutually‐reinforcing ways. First, we show how the teacher and researcher made space for students to express feelings, in part in response to a student who used feelings to challenge “business as usual” classroom discourse on a day when guppies were discovered to have died. Then, we show how, in subsequent implementations, feelings, sensemaking, and practices were braided together to shape classroom investigations. We argue that attending to feelings in this way, as valued resources to be integrated with sensemaking and practices, is an important step toward equitable science teaching and learning and toward understanding learning in student‐driven contexts.