This article reports on urban elementary teachers’ understandings of cultural relevancy and the practices they enacted after a professional development on culturally relevant education (CRE) and cognitive apprenticeship. Focus group interviews support that participating teachers understood some principles of CRE but did not always match the theory to practice before our professional development. After training, video data of teaching support that this divide was mediated. These findings point to a need to engage in explicit theory-to-practice research about cultural relevancy in urban science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teaching. Implications are provided relating to teachers planning lessons purposefully to infuse cultural relevancy into their STEM classrooms.

Teacher education is polarized. Traditionalists tend to center core practices, while justice-oriented scholars center ideologies embedded within our practices. Both, however, must consider how practices and ideologies can operate interdependently to disrupt inequity and cultivate agency among all students. Drawing on an intersectionally-aligned theory, DisCrit, we argue that practices andthe ideologies they embody can be problematized vis-à-vis how racism and ableism operate to support hegemony bound in, and represented by, the normative center of schooling. In this paper, we unpack what DisCrit affords critical teacher education, how individuals with complex support needs are located within DisCrit’s tenets, if at all, and the application of DisCrit in the disciplinary case of science education. By considering possibilities not yet explored within the literature, we further critical conversations about the relationship between DisCrit, silenced perspectives of populations unaddressed in teacher education for equity, and new disciplinary possibilities of what we mean by justice-oriented applications of theory and practice.

Virtual reality (VR) in science classrooms has the potential to enhance students’ learning by bridging the knowledge in the learners’ communities with science instruction. When virtual environments reflect students’ culture, it has the potential to influence their attitudes toward the value of science in their community. This qualitative study examined student reflections on learning science using virtual reality software with embedded culturally relevant design elements. After learning how to use this technology, fifty-eight 4th and 5th grade students from urban schools in Northern California were interviewed about their experiences learning science. Students explained how learning science through virtual worlds influenced their perceptions of how science mattered in their lives. Students explained the influence of CRP–VR in impacting how they saw the value of science in their communities. Implications of this research highlight the need for educational stakeholders to consider the relevance of integrating culturally relevant perspectives in VR technologies. This approach has the potential to position learners and their communities as bearers of scientific knowledge and thus providing a more dynamic learning experience.