Environmental education seeks to foster meaningful connections to local and global environments through creative nature experiences. Responding to critiques of historical inequities, practitioners are prioritizing equitable access for historically marginalized youth, particularly from Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities; this identity-centered prioritization, while essential, generates questions of normativity, diversity, relevance, and engagement within identity groups. Drawing on creativity as meaningful person-world encounters characterized by pluriperspective, future-oriented, nonlinear, and open-ended qualities, this chapter uses culturally sustaining pedagogy to explore how environmental education studies (a) operationalize Latinidad and associated constructs, (b) enact creative experiences in environmental education, and (c) qualify the roles of Latinx communities in shaping these creative experiences. We review studies of environmental education with Latinx youth in the United States that explicitly employ culturally sustaining approaches to engage these communities. We bring together these frameworks as a strategy to move beyond discrete notions of Latinidad in environmental education and toward nuanced conceptions of what it means to acknowledge and cultivate environmental literacies in these diverse comunidades.

Digital game-based learning (DGBL) has the potential to promote equity in K–12 STEM education. However, few teachers have expertise in DBGL, and few professional development models exist to support teachers in both acquiring this expertise and advancing equity. To support the development of such models, we conducted a professional development to explore teacher acquisition of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge for games (TPACK-G) during a DGBL workshop series informed by culturally relevant pedagogy. This mixed methods pilot study used pre- and post-surveys and interviews to investigate shifts in teachers’ (n = 9) TPACK-G, perceptions of DGBL, and operationalizations of equity and cultural relevance. The survey findings showed increases in teachers’ TPACK-G, and corroboration between the surveys and interviews showed teachers’ expanded ideas about the range of applications of digital games in STEM education. However, the interviews revealed that teachers’ conceptualizations of equity and cultural relevance varied considerably.

Ideologies of language and race are deeply connected in the United States. Language practices associated with racially marginalized communities, such as African American Language (AAL) or Spanglish, are often heavily stigmatized. Such stigma is not grounded in empirical research on language, but rather in “raciolinguistic ideologies” that reproduce white supremacy and oppression in teacher education and in US classrooms—including science classrooms. Science education need not be this way, however. Translanguaging pedagogies can create space for students to use any and all types of languaging practices to engage in scientific sensemaking. Implementing translanguaging pedagogies to support scientific sensemaking will require science teachers to develop inclusive ideologies of language—not only the knowledge that multiple varieties of language are valid tools for sensemaking, but also the inclination and ability to formatively assess student thinking even when that thinking is not couched in canonical “science language.” In the present manuscript, we explore the relationships among teachers' language ideologies, their racial ideologies, their knowledge of language as an epistemic tool for teaching science, their self‐reported assessment practices, and their actual responses to several different samples of student science writing—including a writing sample that includes an oft‐stigmatized feature of African American Language. We show that teachers with more language‐inclusive ideologies—that is, those who take a translanguaging stance, and thus value the use of AAL in classrooms—appear to be better at formatively assessing and responding to student science writing compared to teachers with more language‐exclusive ideologies. We also show that seemingly race‐neutral ideologies of language are in fact strongly associated with oppressive ideologies of race, and that these language ideologies predict teachers' science formative assessment practices independently of existing measures of pedagogical knowledge. We discuss implications for science teaching, teacher education, and science education research.

Writing activities can function as powerful teaching tools in science education – but are their benefits realised equitably? The answer may depend in part on how teachers interpret and respond to student writing in light of societal stereotypes that link scientific competence, linguistic competence, and racial, ethnic, or gender identity. In this experiment, high school biology teachers (n = 70) in a U.S. state evaluated and gave feedback on a purported student writing sample. No main effect of student writer’s racialised/gendered identity was found; however, non-Hispanic White teachers gave lower ratings when the writing sample was attributed to a Latina female student rather than a non-Hispanic White male student. The reverse pattern was apparent in the ratings of Hispanic teachers and other teachers of colour. All teachers wrote generally similar feedback, but non-Hispanic teachers of colour and White teachers wrote shorter feedback to a Latina student when ‘her’ score was low, a relationship which did not appear in feedback written to a non-Hispanic White male student. Although most of these disparities did not exhibit statistical significance, many effect sizes were relatively large and may merit further study. Practical implications for equity in science education are discussed.

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 question the meaning and significance of authenticity in student science writing. Next, we examine the framework of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) and ask how it might be used to define authentic purposes for science writing. We offer an additional conception of authentic purpose, one focused on situations where students’ purposes for writing about science directly overlap with teachers’ purposes for asking students to write. We share an illustrative example from our work as teacher educators that demonstrates how CRP can focus our attention on the types of classrooms and interactions that might create conditions where students becoming increasingly likely to pursue their own purposes through writing. Finally, using CRP as a framework, we offer seven strategies that might help create such situations, and discuss their implications for science educators and science education researchers. We argue that using CRP to operationalize science writing for authentic purposes can push the field forward by suggesting new directions for research and practice.

College courses are an important forum for combating the stigmatization of African American Language (AAL). However, there is no comprehensive data regarding where, how, and by whom AAL content is taught. Understanding the landscape of college teaching about AAL could help identify challenges faced by instructors who teach this content, as well as policies or practices that could help support these instructors. We surveyed college instructors (N = 149) in multiple disciplines (primarily Linguistics, Education, English, and Communication Sciences) who teach courses with AAL content. We found patterns in the sources of support and levels of resistance instructors reported. Instructors also expressed varied levels of knowledge and confidence related to teaching about African American Language and Culture. Many of these patterns were correlated with instructors’ racialized identities and language backgrounds. We discuss implications for professional organizations, university department leaders, and instructors who teach AAL content.