Angela Calabrese Barton

Science education often approaches climate change as a scientific issue, disconnected from its multidimensional nature and lived realities. As climate‐related disasters intensify, teachers must help students confront climate challenges by connecting scientific learning to local contexts and addressing embedded systemic injustices. However, research is needed to explore how situated lived experiences shape teachers' pedagogical perspectives, responsibility, and hope toward community‐based, justice‐oriented climate learning opportunities. This study centers the voices and experiences of Bedouin indigenous teachers who are themselves minoritized and serve students living in the same context. Drawing upon critical narrative inquiry, we examine how these teachers make sense of place‐based climate change experiences as residents, parents, and community members, and how these experiences inform their pedagogical perspectives and the sociopolitical tensions therein. Our findings reveal that teachers' sense of place shapes how they experience climate change through their cultural connections to land, witnessing environmental degradation, and experiencing systemic vulnerability. They contextualize climate education in ways reflecting community concerns, lived experiences, and assets. However, their sense of place embodies tensions between cultural identity and social exclusion, with climate change acting as a threat multiplier that intensifies existing vulnerabilities. Teachers expressed the burden of confronting multiple oppressions that constrain their agency. They navigate complex positions as members of vulnerable communities, “a Bedouin living this tragedy,” while simultaneously operating within oppressive structures, including schools, policies, and colonial scientific frameworks. By foregrounding a sense of place, our study offers new ways for understanding how teachers position themselves within climate issues and what justice‐oriented climate education can look like in their communities. Place‐based perspectives can support locally grounded, transformative pedagogies by recognizing minoritized teachers as local knowledge holders. We argue that science education must recognize teachers as transformative agents and foster critical hope that enables them to navigate structural barriers while sustaining transformative possibilities.

Despite the growing interest in incorporating care ethics into STEM education, these topics are rarely integrated into K‐12 standards and pedagogical practice. We explore how care praxis, a political and ethical approach to STEM education, supports students' sense‐making in addressing real‐world problems throughout STEM design, merging social, environmental, and technical aspects. Care praxis highlights the iterative, reflective method of initiating action, acting as an ethical, political, humanistic, and justice‐oriented mode of engagement with the world, thereby fostering sustainable communities. Drawing upon participatory critical design‐based research and ethnographic methods, we collaborated with two teachers, students, and families from an urban middle school classroom to adapt and implement a STEM curriculum that focuses on engineering for sustainable communities. Our findings show how a care praxis in the context of a STEM unit focused on engineering for sustainable communities can support students in more expansive sense‐making by enacting care‐oriented, community‐engaged engineering practices. The process was facilitated through four stages of caring within the design cycle: (1) caring‐about social needs (identifying a problem), (2) taking‐care by solidifying and prioritizing these needs (refining a problem in collaboration with community and determining criteria for solving a problem), (3) care‐giving by designing solutions that connect social, environmental, and technical aspects (designing and iterating solutions), and (4) nested‐care by expanding the design functionality to foster well‐being and active participation in community building (integrating designs into everyday practice). We discuss how to enact the transformative potential of integrating a care praxis into middle school STEM education, thereby fostering a more contextual and ethical approach to design solutions. A care praxis approach bridges epistemologies and ontologies, creating a productive space for students to engage in sense‐making around humanization and justice‐oriented aspects of science and engineering.

This chapter examines the transformative potential of integrating arts into STEM education (STEAM) within a justice-oriented framework. Since its formalization in the United States, STEM education has been primarily aimed at preparing students for workforce participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. However, recent shifts emphasize expanding STEM’s reach to historically underrepresented groups and making STEM content more relevant to students’ lives. STEAM education offers an approach that enriches STEM by incorporating creative practices and addressing social justice issues, thereby fostering more inclusive learning environments and cultivating critical consciousness among students. Through case studies, including intergenerational STEAM workshops with Indigenous families and embodied science learning with students of color, this chapter highlights how STEAM allows for culturally rooted, creative, and reflective learning experiences. By engaging students in both artistic and scientific practices, STEAM promotes hybrid forms of knowledge creation, empowering students to question systemic injustices and see themselves as active participants in STEM fields. This approach positions STEAM not only as a pedagogical tool but also as a pathway for reshaping educational spaces to support social and ethical dimensions in STEM learning.

Street youth experience similar exclusionary tendencies in German regular schools as in the society at large. These negative schooling experiences push many street youth out of school, leading to graduation gaps and causing street careers to emerge. Street schools have responded to these inequalities, offering street youth more humanizing alternatives. Drawing upon a rightful presence framework, dialogic interviews with 14 educators and 10 school leaders, mission statements, and websites of street schools, we sought to understand how street schools may foster equitable educational opportunities for their students. Analysis focused on how street schools’ educators and leaders engage in an ongoing political struggle to support their students’ educational rights. Findings reveal that street schools not only criticize existing structures of the educational system, but also consciously reject them—despite consequences. The findings accentuate where and how the systems of schooling need to change to facilitate educational equity for street youth.

This chapter catalogs educator actions made necessary by systemic failures during the COVID-19 pandemic. The 21 educators featured in this chapter represent a range of ages, races, genders, educational roles, and years of experience. Educators shared their experiences primarily in remote interviews during the first 12–15 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Inductive coding surfaced the specific actions that educators took on behalf of youths and families including: (1) Providing Tailored Support for Basic Needs and Belonging, (2) Fostering Equitable Communication (3) Expressing Socio-Political Solidarity (4) Navigating COVID-19 Safety Protocols, and (5) Supporting Self and Other Educators. Their actions provide a glimpse into marginalized communities, their resilience, and the need for an interconnected web of resources to support the health and well-being of students and their families. This research contributes a nuanced account of the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic that attends to the ingenuity of educators and recognizes the necessity of practices oriented toward long-standing solidarity and care with and for minoritized youth and communities as a critical component of quality urban education. We conclude by offering four policy and practice implications within and across formal and informal education sectors that can harness the COVID-19 crisis toward transformative change.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, discourse emphasized a lost generation and learning loss. However, community educators worked tirelessly to meet the needs of youth, families, and communities. However, there needs to be more research documenting the actions educators took to support their communities. Using critical care, we characterize the actions of community educators in an urban west coast city and an urban midwestern city and the sociopolitical factors that influenced them. Our goal is to illustrate how educators sustained communities during a crisis. We offer implications for professional learning opportunities for educators that emphasize ways to enact critical care.

Systems of schooling and STEM have been organized around White supremacy and middle-class values and practices that sideline minoritized students and families. Although White middle-class families exert significant influence on their children’s schooling and by extension, other children, families of minoritized students typically have experienced fewer such opportunities. We take up family engagement in STEM education as a contested equity terrain with attention to minoritized families and communities. Our critical metasynthesis points to the need for systems transformation vis-à-vis familial rightful presence, a logic that emphasizes new ethical relations that redefine the social institutions and contours of engagement. The four underpinning principles of this logic collectively create the conditions for new, thriving futures for families and schools that are just and healthy. They include (a) spatial and temporal resonances, (b) solidarity toward equitable collaboration and coordination for the here and now and toward desired futures, (c) collective responsibility for family-engaged justice-oriented STEM, and (d) STEM for thriving, recognition, and critical democratic citizenry. We consider whether and how such a logic disrupts/transforms how systemic injustices manifest in schooling practices and orient toward systems transformation.

Informal science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning (ISL) can remain inequitable when discourse and practices in ISL spaces position youth as temporary guests by implicitly or explicitly sidelining youths' experiences, community wisdom, cultures, and histories. The framework of rightful presence problematizes guest–host relationalities that delimit youths' rights in learning spaces. It calls for educators' disruptive and transformative practices in support of youths reauthoring rights toward co‐creating equitable learning opportunities. This study explored how such practices emerge from educators' routine ISL instructions. Using comparative constant analysis of data generated from a larger research–practice partnership project in regional ISL settings, we identified three practices that differed in how educators supported rightful presence through engaging youths in ISL design: (1) educator‐designed space making; (2) taking‐up youths' disruption and reorganizing ISL opportunities; (3) co‐creating new ISL opportunities. Practice 1 primarily focused on fostering disciplinary and social engagement, often prompting educators to further enact Practice 2 or 3. Practice 2 or 3 made space not only for youths' equitable access to educator‐designed ISL but also for reconfiguring power relationalities with youths for reauthoring ISL opportunities. Our findings suggest that support for rightful presence can begin from ordinary educator‐designed ISL practices but should also seek to disrupt the ordinariness with youths. We discuss findings, including how Practices 2 and 3 can be more purposefully enacted in the ISL curricular and structural planning phase, moving beyond their emergence as a follow‐up on Practice 1. Implications are considered regarding the role of STEM education research and practice in support of youths' presence as rightful participants, re‐organizers, and constructors of their ISL opportunities and futures.