Science Understandings and Discourses: Trajectories of Imaginaries in Multicultural US Classrooms and Beyond

The chapter examines and reviews science education research over the last 20 years that offers insights into how discourse mediates science learning in elementary school students’ classrooms and age-equivalent out-of-school learning environments in the United States. It highlights perspectives that center the intellectual, social, and cultural repertoires of students from minoritized racial, ethnic, and linguistic communities (e.g., African diaspora, Latinx, Native American, and immigrant children), alongside addressing hierarchies of power and epistemologies in science learning and teaching in order to disrupt dominant ideologies of what it means to know and do science. That is, we focus on how science education researchers have engaged with, accounted for, described, theorized, and explained discourses in US classrooms and beyond that have been called for by multicultural education perspectives. In our review of the literature, hybridity and heterogeneity of knowing and discourse, relationships between teachers and students and among students themselves, identity construction and social and affective dimensions of knowing, and structure-agency dynamics associated with authority emerged as constructs that researchers and educators continue to grapple with to reimagine science learning for elementary-school-aged children. The chapter also captures the movement from discourse as language-centric to perspectives that embrace multimodal development and expression of science understandings. Building on these ideas, it identifies areas of research on science discourses to continue the focus on designing and understanding spaces and places for science learning that disrupt hierarchies of science knowing and communicating.