We designed a professional learning series for science teachers to support their integration of computational practices into instruction, and to design equitable learning opportunities for students to engage in computation. During the professional learning series, we provided the teachers with two main resources to support their enactment of equitable computational pedagogies: computationally integrated (CI) tasks, and the Equity Quantified in Participation (EQUIP) tool. We also broadcasted a contextual discourse about the importance of equitable computational instruction, and infused this narrative into all professional learning sessions. Our goal for the contextual discourse was that it might shape teachers’ personal vision of instruction (their critical pedagogical discourses). We describe two major assertions from the data analysis. First, the primary resources (CI tasks and EQUIP) focused teachers’ attention on different kinds of instructional interactions with distinct topical themes for each resource. Second, each teacher’s critical pedagogical discourses shaped how they recognized and used the primary resources, and we illustrate differences between teachers using contrasting cases.

Complex scientific equations often appear opaque to students—not just because of symbolic formatting, but also due to how learners activate and coordinate different varieties of mechanistic and mathematical schemas. We present a multimodal analysis of advanced undergraduates’ reasoning across three interview tasks involving concepts modeled by the Nernst equation—an equation that models electrochemical equilibrium. Drawing on the Knowledge in Pieces framework, particularly the symbolic-forms framework, we show that students interpret the equation by coordinating the same mathematical structures with different mechanistic schemas—principally equilibrium- and balance-based reasoning. One student, Oscar, highlights dynamic shifts between these reasoning modes compared to his peers who were relatively more stable in their either equilibrium- or balance-based reasoning. We illustrate how an equation’s format can sometimes shift students away from productive mathematical schemata coupled to mechanistic schemata that align with a natural system’s structure. We argue that instructors should attend not only to students’ formal manipulations of equations but also to how task design and equation format jointly co-activate different knowledge resources and modes of reasoning. Implications for instructional design include deliberately cueing conceptual framings that develop mechanistic reasoning in addition to calculation.

Indian higher education, while a beacon of opportunity, often becomes a site of profound struggle for Dalit students facing entrenched caste discrimination. This paper moves beyond narratives of victimhood, instead spotlighting the powerful agency of Dalit students as they actively reshape their educational journeys. Through intimate interviews with three marginalized caste students, we uncover how their everyday actions embody transformative defiance. Their stories reveal strategic efforts: challenging pervasive myths about academic merit and reservations, illuminating the complex layers of intersectional discrimination, broadening linguistic practices within university spaces, and directly confronting systemic inequities in admissions and social life. These narratives demonstrate how Dalit students assert their dignity and drive change through both individual and collective resistance. This study ultimately champions Dalit voices and knowledge, calling for educational systems that truly affirm their experiences and foster equitable learning environments.

While long recognized as a promising instructional reform, Project-Based Learning (PBL) remains uncommon in U.S. classrooms. This article investigates the outcomes of a practice-based professional development (PD) focused on supporting middle and high school teachers to develop and enact a set of teaching practices for PBL. Grounded in cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), we analyzed teacher interviews and portfolios of practice and found striking patterns in how teachers described each of the PBL practices that were focused on in the PD. While teachers described certain PBL teaching practices as things they did on their own, they described other teaching practices as being significantly enabled or constrained by their school and community. For almost all participating teachers it was the PBL teaching practices that were most countercultural to historical schooling practices that teachers’ described as being significantly influenced by communities. Out of these findings, we argue that if professional learning seeks to spark radical transformations in instructional practice, teaching practice itself may need to be reconceptualized as a communal activity rather than an individual one. The authors examine the implications of this reconceptualization for both theory and designs for professional learning.

In this article, we present a coordination of two prominent theoretical perspectives in mathematics education—spatial structuring and units coordination—for building models of students’ spatial enumerations and measurement. The authors, each experienced in either theoretical perspective, hypothesized that a coordination of the two theories may be possible, given their common grounding in Piagetian theory. We argue that such a coordination is not only possible, but important for supporting collaboration across research communities and for building more robust explanatory models of students’ mathematics. Indeed, a central claim of this article is that by building a coordinated theoretical framework, researchers can explain students’ mathematics better than if they apply either theory alone. Methodologically, our coordination of the two theories was empirically driven. We conducted clinical interviews with pre-service elementary school teachers, analyzed interview data from each theoretical perspective separately, then engaged in a process of coordinating our spatial-structuring- and units-coordination-based models. In addition to our proposed coordination of these two theoretical perspectives, secondary contributions of this article include revised definitions of certain theoretical constructs, a case study of analyzing one pre-service elementary school teacher’s reasoning through our coordinated framework (and how our coordinated analysis contributes to insights into this student’s spatial-numerical reasoning), and an illustration of how two epistemologically-compatible theories focusing on students’ mathematical thinking can be coordinated.

This study examines an expansive shift in the priorities of professional learning within a collective of high school science teachers, scientists, community organizers, youth, and educational researchers who were working together on classroom science projects grounded in community concerns of environmental racism. Through a participatory design-based approach, we challenge the assumed relationship between educational research and priorities for teacher professional learning. The study elucidates the processes of teacher solidarity co-design by which our group decided to refocus a professional development institute for science teachers on learning three realms of historical context: history of neighborhoods, grassroots campaigns for environmental justice, and relationships between science and industry. Our analysis indicates that four elements of our co-design worked together to facilitate an expansive shift in the object of professional learning to prioritize science teachers’ learning of history. Specifically, we identified the following elements as supporting teacher priorities to determine the direction of our collective learning: (1) the composition of our “more-than-teacher collective,” (2) the dialogic structure of our institutes, (3) the temporal structure of institutes that emphasized praxis, and (4) our decision to focus on a specific real-world problem rather than disciplinary concepts or teaching practices. These findings may inform new relationships between educational research and the professional learning of teachers wherein the priorities of the latter are collectively determined.

This study investigated a journalistic learning approach in a high school English class within a civic media literacies framework toward civic intentionality. Informed by social-cognitive theory, this study focused on learning if and how the student experience developed (a) motivational factors for student writing, including self-efficacy, belonging, writing anxiety, agentic engagement, metacognitive self-regulation, flow in writing, and intrinsic writing motivation, and (b) cognitive factors for writing, including critical thinking and digital media literacy. The sequential mixed method study used correlations, pre- to post-program change analysis, and the triangulation of qualitative thematic analyses of student focus group and teacher interview data. Results supported most of the expected relationships, suggesting the experience likely contributed to a positive shift in motivational and cognitive factors for writing. Qualitative data highlighted the most impactful parts of the journalistic learning experience, such as interviewing real-world experts for their stories, that increased students’ interest and motivation in writing about real-world issues. The mixed method results build an integrated narrative of students’ agentic, cognitive, and metacognitive development in journalistic skills, reinforcing the importance of interest-driven learning opportunities in writing and autonomy-support in skill development, such as in writing, that brings anxiety to many students.

Facilitating whole-class discussions based on tasks that support inquiry and provide conceptual learning opportunities has been identified as a central, challenging task of teaching. We drew upon practice-based and interactionist research traditions to decompose how eight experienced Grades 5–7 mathematics teachers facilitated whole-class discussions after their students had determined volumes for rectangular prisms. The discussions highlighted ways that students worked with wooden cubes, imposed multiplicative structures, and developed formal calculations. Qualitative analysis of the video-recorded lessons revealed five practices that the teachers used to facilitate whole-class discussions. Three of the practices supported extensive, explicit connections between higher-order and lower-order knowledge elements related to volumes of rectangular prisms. We characterized such instruction as providing deep conceptual learning opportunities. The remaining two practices jumped quickly to calculations and did not make as many explicit connections to the organization of cubes in rows, columns, and layers. We characterized such instruction as providing shallow learning opportunities. Identifying the five facilitation practices contributes to theorizing about relations between teaching and learning that support conceptual understanding and underscores the importance of examining such relations at a micro-level and in the context of specific mathematical topics. Moreover, the results can inform professional development programs that seek to help teachers to enact productive conceptual learning opportunities during whole-class discussions.

Dialogic classroom discussions where students collaboratively share and reason through complex ideas are critical for achieving ambitious reform goals for student learning. However, K-12 classroom talk is predominantly characterized by monologic, “teacher-centered” discourse patterns that have proven exceedingly resilient to change. Teacher learning researchers and practitioners have increasingly emphasized developing teachers’ noticing and reasoning about the link between their pedagogical choices and student thinking in reflection as key for transforming teaching practice. Less is known, however, about the mechanisms that link teacher reflection processes to growth in classroom discussion quality. In this study, we conducted in-depth comparative case analyses of two 5th grade teachers’ learning trajectories as they participated in a video-based literacy coaching intervention. Findings show a close link between overall levels of growth in teachers’ reflection and classroom discussion quality, including the quality of student discussion contributions. Findings also reveal that the extent to which teachers adopted “exclusionary” ideological framings related to learning and learner ability in reflection was highly influential for shaping differential growth in their learning and practice trajectories over time. This study contributes toward a more robust and nuanced theory of how teachers develop adaptive expertise for dialogic forms of classroom discussion.