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In this paper, we share findings from Family Leadership Design Collaborative’s (FLDC) multi-year work, which comprised 10 co-design collaboratives engaged in historicizing their experiences and imagining transformative possibilities for education together. Using knowledge and interaction analysis (e.g., diSessa, Levin, & Brown, 2015) we examined collaboratives’ conceptual ecologies (Kelly & Green, 1998) to develop an empirical typology of collaboratives' theories of change (Tuck & Yang, 2018), or the broader aims and the who, what and how of their change-making conversations in community design circles, a first step of solidarity-driven codesign (Ishimaru et al., 2018). Across a diverse range of geographically, linguistically, and racially diverse families and communities, we intentionally rooted the design conversation in an initial set of principles in order to move beyond status quo problem-solving and open social dreaming spaces towards collective changemaking. We found: 1) a conceptual ecology of multiple theories of change both across contexts and within a given context; 2) systems-centric theories of change (premised on family deficiencies or institutional pragmatics) that constrained the dreaming of transformative possibilities; and 3) the increase of more expansive and transformative theories of change as the engagement was sustained and nurtured over time. We argue that sustained engagements that build politicized trust and the ability to grapple with tensions can deepen relational theorizing and enable groups to shape imaginative possibilities for pursuing and realizing change.

Imagining systemic change can be a lot to ask of Black and Latinx families in urban communities in light of long, sometimes intergenerational histories of marginalization and dehumanization in schools. For twenty years, CADRE (Community Asset Development Redefining Education) has been building the power and leadership of Black and Brown families in South Los Angeles “to protect and promote children’s dignity, opportunity to learn, and self-determination, by being at decision-making and policy-making tables and having the tools to monitor accountability in policy implementation.” When the community organizing group first engaged with the Family Leadership Design Collaborative (FLDC), CADRE had already successfully gotten the district to adopt new school discipline policies to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline and had continued to monitor implementation (CADRE, 2017). However, the fundamental relationships and interactions between families and teachers in schools continued to reflect racist, dehumanizing ideologies entrenched in inequitable power dynamics. Maisie Chin, the Executive Director of CADRE, facilitated a series of codesign sessions with CADRE parents between 2017 and 2019 to not only surface these dynamics but to re-imagine how parent-teacher conversations and interactions might be different. CADRE co-designers undertook role-playing and collective reflection to intervene in moment-to-moment interactions as a way to change broader systemic dynamics.

Despite decades of climate science research, existing climate actions have had limited impacts on mitigating climate change. Efforts to reduce emissions, for example, have yet to spur sufficient action to reduce the most severe effects of climate change. We draw from our experiences as Ojibwe knowledge holders and community members, scientists, and scholars to demonstrate how the lack of recognition of traditional knowledges (TK) within climate science constrains effective climate action and exacerbates climate injustice. Often unrecognized in science and policy arenas, TK generates insights into how justice-driven climate action, rooted in relational interdependencies between humans and older-than-human relatives, can provide new avenues for effectively addressing climate change. We conclude by arguing for a shift toward meaningful and respectful inclusion of plural knowledge systems in climate governance.

Parent-child communication is a rich, multi-modal process. Substantial research has documented the communicative strategies in certain (predominantly white) United States families, yet we know little about these communicative strategies in Native American families. The current study addresses that gap by documenting the verbal and nonverbal behaviors used by parents and their four-year-old children (N=39, 25 boys) across two communities: Menominee families (low to middle income) living on tribal lands in rural Wisconsin, and non-Native, primarily white families (middle income) living in an urban area. Dyads participated in a free-play forest-diorama task designed to elicit talk and play about the natural world. Children from both communities incorporated actions and gestures freely in their talk, emphasizing the importance of considering nonverbal behaviors when evaluating what children know. In sharp contrast to the stereotype that Native American children talk very little, Menominee children talked more than their non-Native counterparts, underlining the importance of taking into account cultural context in child assessments. For children and parents across both communities, gestures were more likely than actions to be related to the content of speech and were more likely than actions to be produced simultaneously with speech. This tight coupling between speech and gesture replicates and extends prior research with predominantly white (and adult) samples. These findings not only broaden our theories of communicative interaction and development, but also provide new evidence about the role of nonverbal behaviors in informal learning contexts.

The combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning in the United States make 2021 a potent moment to reimagine American education. This article introduces an ongoing Kappan series in which scholars look ahead to imagine what K-12 education will look like in 25 years. Na’ilah Nasir, Megan Bang, and Hirokazu Yoshikawa discuss some of the factors that have created an environment ripe for transformation and some of their ideas for what the future should look like.

The Framework for K-12 Science Education (National Research Council, 2012) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013) represent a vision of equity for science and engineerin...

This issue is particularly timely, in its plea to the field to understand that human learning and development have always been on the move—always migrating—even if and when we construct sedentarist...

Yarkoni's paper makes an important contribution to psychological research by its insightful analysis of generalizability. We suggest, however, that broadening research practices to include field research and the correlated use of both converging and complementary observations gives reason for optimism.

This article presents findings from TechTales, a participatory design research (PDR) project where learning scientists, public library staff members, informal science educators, and staff members f...

Social and cultural practices in learning settings are sites for leveraging and/or remediating sustainable and just conceptions of nature–culture relations to meet changing environmental demands of twenty-first century. In this study, we examine epistemic navigation among Indigenous youth in an outdoor, land based, STEAM (science, education, arts, math, and science) camp which not only leveraged nature-culture relations as part of critical engagement with socio-ecological systems, but also as a site for Indigenous resurgence and well-being in learning spaces. We take a microethnographic (Gee and Green in Rev Res Educ 23:119–169, 1998. https://doi.org/10.2307/1167289 ) approach to examine sense-making among three youth while engaged in a walking activity in which they were asked to embody a plant as part of cultural practices of reading the land. We found that the micro-practice of spatial indexing dynamically mediated sense-making about ecological systems as participants coordinated attention and observations between humans and more-than-human kinds. This form of sense making reflected both cultural and historical experiences, which students leveraged in their understandings of complex socio-ecological systems.

Researchers and practitioners of family engagement have long called for a move beyond conventional deficit-based family-school partnerships. In response, a burgeoning movement in the field has sought to identify and enact new forms of collaboration with nondominant families and communities, in terms of both change-making andthe process of research itself. In this article, we bridge the fields of family engagement and design-based research to conceptualize and illustrate a solidarity-driven process of partnership we undertook with families and communities of color, educators, and other researchers towards community-defined wellbeing and education justice. We offer community design circles as a methodological evolution aimed at reclaiming the central agentic role of families and communities of color in transforming educational research and practice. We illustrate three co-design dimensions with vignettes from a national-level participatory design research project called the Family Leadership Design Collaborative: 1) building from and with families’ and communities’ definitions of wellbeing and justice; 2) disrupting normative, asymmetrical dynamics; and 3) building capacity for social dreaming and changemaking.

In this chapter we explore what is required of us, as researchers and educators, to disentangle settled disciplinary knowledge and ways of knowing from colonial matrices of power, and to enable insurgent ways of learning, being, and acting in, with, and across disciplines. We posit three sensibilities that are critical to liberatory forms of disciplinary learning animated by onto-epistemic heterogeneity: multiplicity, horizontality, and dialogicality. Grounded in extended examples, we define these sensibilities, illustrate how they shift both the content and the terms of disciplinary ways of knowing in literacy, science, and mathematics, and articulate key implications for the design of learning and the practice of teaching.

In this chapter, we share an edited transcript of a conversation that we, the authors, held about methods for researcher self-care and protection. Working with the transcript, we crafted four ideational composites that are grounded in our life experience and personal stories of engaging in research with youth and communities with whom we have strong relationships. Each of these composites focuses on a set of relational dimensions about researcher self-care. We offer these composites as points of reflection and hope that other researchers may glean meaning from our stories in ways that are personally affirming as well as enriching.

This case study focuses on a Native American family's experience on a walk in an urban forest preserve. Drawing on interaction analysis traditions, we analyze video data and transcript data to characterize how learning unfolds in place, in this case an urban forest. We build on this analysis, as well as the work of Indigenous scholars, to theoretically develop walking, reading, and storying land as a methodology for making sense of physical and biological worlds.

Cognition and Instruction has developed a well-deserved reputation for publishing empirically grounded scholarship that makes rich theoretical contributions to what it means to “think, learn, know,...

Indigenous sciences are foundationally based in relationships, reciprocity, and responsibilities. These sciences constitute systems of knowledge developed through distinct perspectives on and practices of knowledge creation and decision-making that not only have the right to be pursued on their own terms but may also be vital in solving critical twenty-first-century challenges. “Science” is often treated as if it were a single entity, free of cultural influences and value-neutral in principle. Western science is often seen as instantiating and equivalent to this idealized, yet problematic, view of science. We argue for engagement with multiple perspectives on science in general, and increased engagement with Indigenous sciences in particular. As scholars focused on human learning and development, we share empirical examples of how Indigenous sciences, sometimes in partnership with Western science, have led to new discoveries and insights into human learning and development.

In this article we expand on ideas of making and maker spaces to develop Indigenous making and sharing. We draw from an ArtScience participatory design project that involved Indigenous youth, famil...

This study examined the play of 4-year-old children with a forest diorama that included toy representations of plants and animals. To examine the potential role of culture and expertise in diorama ...

In this chapter, we call for Indigenous family leadership and engagement in systems of education that aim to support Indigenous communities. We argue that despite everyday resistance and resurgence enacted by Indigenous families and communities, systems of education for Indigenous children and youth often remain sites of renewed traumatization and Indigenous erasure. Synthesizing and building from the work of many Indigenous scholars and allies challenging hegemonic and settler colonial agendas in education, this chapter highlights routine closures and possible openings for future research and practice. We argue that transformative and equitable family-school partnerships require both a recognition that Indigenous families are changemakers and leaders in their communities and that collaboration between Indigenous families, schools, and researchers work towards sustainable and just Indigenous futures.

This special issue brings together a set of articles by scholars working to expand equitable forms of learning and teaching that contribute to a socially just democracy—or what we might call “socia...

Researchers and educational leaders have long debated the appropriate roles and forms of family engagement in education. Although, in recent years, scholars have sought to understand how racially and linguistically diverse communities should participate in their children’s education, the field has struggled to recognize and engage families’ expertise and disrupt the dynamics of inequity that shape disengagement. In this article, we highlight recent understandings regarding the development of disciplinary identities and cultural practices in learning to offer new approaches to the field of family engagement for conceptualizing the untapped potential of nondominant family knowledge and cultural practices in learning settings. By highlighting examples from mathematics learning that center families as legitimate sources of knowledge, we suggest avenues for engaging diverse family leadership in co-designing equitable learning environments that foster students’ empowering disciplinary identities and learning.

This chapter describes a participatory design research project among learning scientists, public librarians, informal science education staff, and staff from Native American–serving community organizations who are jointly focused on designing family-centered and culturally expansive STEAM learning experiences with nondominant communities. The program that is described in some detail is TechTales, a program that invited families to conceptualize new relationships to technology (such as robotics and Scratch) and desettle some of the traditional knowledge relationships associated with educational programming. Perspectives and voices from partners, including from staff at the Seattle Public Library, are shared. The accumulated wisdom of this experience is translated into new possibilities and considerations for participatory design and design-based implementation research in the future.

The socio-ecological challenges facing communities in the 21st century are building towards a critical conjuncture of history, culture, power, and profound inequity. Scholars working in the service of social transformation and improving the wellbeing of communities are calling for creative, deliberate, and consequential interventions. Tharp & O’Donnell (this issue) call for increased engagement between Cultural-Community Psychology and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory to lead this kind of call. Drawing from our experiences in community based design research, we argue for cultivating axiological innovations in research and interventions. We explore three examples including: critical historicity, inter-generational learning, and strategic transformations of institutional relations.

We aim to share some of our work currently focused on understanding and unearthing the multiplicities of ways the denial of culture in relation to science and knowledge construction is embedded in issues of climate change and climate change education. The issues become more troubling when we consider how effects of climate change are manifesting locally in ways that force shifts in Indigenous ways of living while simultaneously nation-states seem to think that continued or increased control of Indigenous practice is warranted. For us, taking the implications of such approaches seriously requires significant consideration of how climate education impacts Indigenous learners and whether learning western climate science is indeed part of making real change important. In our work we have focused on the ways in which settler-colonialism and the resultant racialized hierarchies permeate science education and contribute to an expectation of human entitlement to land and a notion of land permanence.

The field of science education has struggled to create robust, meaningful forms of education that effectively engage students from historically non-dominant communities and women. This paper argues that a primary issue underlying this on-going struggle pivots on constructions of nature–culture relations. We take up structuration theory (Giddens, 1984. The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.) and decolonizing methodologies (Smith, 2012. Decolonizing methodologies research and Indigenous peoples (2nd. ed.). London: Zed Books.) to reflect on the structural principles of the settled expectations of nature–culture relations. We suggest that taken together both Giddens' and Smith's respective discussions of time-space relations provide a powerful framing for nature–culture relations. Carefully examining shifts in the temporal and spatial scales during moments of talk and action in out-of-school science activities may help to increase the field's understanding of divergences, convergences, and productive generativity between Western science and Indigenous ways of knowing to create transformative science learning. Drawing on our work in community-based design research and studies of everyday parent–child interactions, we begin to describe emergent structural principles that may desettle normative time-space and nature–culture relations. In addition, we describe specific practices and pedagogical forms that expand views of human and non-human agency, as well as present and possible socio-ecological futures. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 52: 530–544, 2015

Intrinsic to the social, educational and behavioural sciences is the aim of addressing patterned variation in human thought and action across settings. Surprisingly, however, empirical work in these sciences continues to be limited by a lack of diversity in study populations, research methodology and the researchers themselves. This Perspective analyses these dimensions of diversity as they are situated in and affected by the larger organizational systems for publication, grants and academic advancement. This complex system appears to operate in a mutually reinforcing manner to discourage diversity. Our analysis suggests that diversity goals central to our sciences will require systems-level action rather than a focus on any one component in isolation. Lack of diversity in study populations, research methodologies and the researchers themselves undermines the goal of identifying and understanding the full range of human behaviour. Medin et al. argue that this system of non-diversity represents a crisis for the science of human behaviour.

The main proposition of this paper is that science communication necessarily involves and includes cultural orientations. There is a substantial body of work showing that cultural differences in values and epistemological frameworks are paralleled with cultural differences reflected in artifacts and public representations. One dimension of cultural difference is the psychological distance between humans and the rest of nature. Another is perspective taking and attention to context and relationships. As an example of distance, most (Western) images of ecosystems do not include human beings, and European American discourse tends to position human beings as being apart from nature. Native American discourse, in contrast, tends to describe humans beings as a part of nature. We trace the correspondences between cultural properties of media, focusing on children’s books, and cultural differences in biological cognition. Finally, implications for both science communication and science education are outlined.

In this paper, we aim to contribute to ongoing work to uncover the ways in which settler colonialism is entrenched and reified in educational environments and explore lessons learned from an urban Indigenous land-based education project. In this project, we worked to re-center our perceptual habits in Indigenous cosmologies, or land-based perspectives, and came to see land re-becoming itself. Through this recentering, we unearthed some ways in which settler colonialism quietly operates in teaching and learning environments and implicitly and explicitly undermines Indigenous agency and futurity by maintaining and reifying core dimensions of settler colonial relations to land. We describe examples in which teachers and community members explicitly re-engaged land-based perspectives in the design and implementation of a land-based environmental science education that enabled epistemological and ontological centering that significantly impacted learning, agency, and resilience for urban Indigenous youth and f...

which is composed of the deans of the education schools/colleges at the following universities: Harvard University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Stanford University, Teachers College Columbia University, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Wisconsin.

An examination of artifacts provides insights into the goals, practices, and orientations of the persons and cultures who created them. Here, we analyze storybook texts, artifacts that are a part of many children's lives. We examine the stories in books targeted for 4–8-year-old children, contrasting the texts generated by Native American authors versus popular non-Native authors. We focus specifically on the implicit and explicit ‘epistemological orientations’ associated with relations between human beings and the rest of nature. Native authors were significantly more likely than non-Native authors to describe humans and the rest of nature as psychologically close and embedded in relationships. This pattern converges well with evidence from a behavioral task in which we probed Native (from urban inter-tribal and rural communities) and non-Native children's and adults' attention to ecological relations. We discuss the implications of these differences for environmental cognition and science learning.

Indigenous people are significantly underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The solution to this problem requires a more robust lens than representation or access alone. Specifically, it will require careful consideration of the ecological contexts of Indigenous school age youth, of which more than 70% live in urban communities (National Urban Indian Family Coalition, 2008). This article reports emergent design principles derived from a community-based design research project. These emergent principles focus on the conceptualization and uses of technology in science learning environments designed for urban Indigenous youth. In order to strengthen learning environments for urban Indigenous youth, it is necessary, we argue, that scholars and educators take seriously the ways in which culture mediates relationships with, conceptions of, and innovations in technology and technologically related disciplines. Recognizing these relationships will inform the subsequent implications for learning environments.

This chapter describes a central tenet of Indigenous American social interaction, which emphasizes mutuality in collaboration and caring in Indigenous communities. This includes interactions with an agentive natural world, in which more-than-human beings act as participants in the lives of humans and vice versa. We argue that research on children's learning should take a broader view of interactional partners to include the natural world.

Increasingly research has focused on understanding the opportunities for learning children and adults have in informal or out of school contexts as these informal contexts make up a far more significant portion of the life course than formal schooling (Bell et al. 2009). Simultaneously there have been efforts to increase children’s engagement with the natural world given the devolving nature of biological knowledge (Medin and Atran 2004) and the mental and physical health benefits in increasing children’s outdoor play (e.g. Louv 2007). Further, the socio-ecological challenges of the twenty-first century have increasingly focused on issues of food sustainability and the potential role of gardens. Importantly though much of these efforts have largely been conceptualized and driven by white middle class narratives. Situated within this larger context, this study sought to understand Native peoples’ perspectives about gardening and the opportunities that children had to learn about biological knowledge in the contexts of gardens. This study engaged adults and children in surveys and interview to answer the following questions: (1) What are Native and non-Native peoples conceptions of gardens and gardening? (2) What is the range of biological knowledge reflected in gardening practices? (3) What are the implications for opportunities to learn about the biological world? The bulk of the work reported here comes from a broader study (Bang 2009) however in this chapter I focus specifically on comparisons between Native and non-Native peoples conceptions of gardens and what the opportunities for learning are in garden spaces.

Gardens and learning in gardens are increasingly a focus in education, restoration, and community development. In this chapter I consider gardens and the opportunities for learning they afford from an expansive view of culture, learning and socio-historical practice. At their core, gardens are broadly about the cultivation of plants and land, however, gardening reflects complex variations, goals, and values affording various forms of identity and meaning. Indeed throughout history human communities have cultivated and harvested plants for food, for medicine, for aesthetics, for material resources, and much more. The specifics of these practices have evolved and shifted over time and varied across cultural communities, however, regardless of their specific form gardening practices are foundational reflective of the relations between humans and the natural world. The rise of learning gardens is perhaps a resilient response and remembering given the erosion of people from land that has emerged in the technologically saturated twentieth century. Given this expanded view of gardens in human communities and the present socio-historical dynamics, what might the possibilities for learning gardens be? What opportunities for learning do learning gardens afford? What are the variations in learning gardens? How do the particulars of gardens (their design, their goals, the plants grown, the programs and practices associated with them) impact learning? Largely, the answers to these questions are unknown or under-explored.

Calls for the improvement of science education in the USA continue unabated, with particular concern for the quality of learning opportunities for students from historically nondominant communities. Despite many and varied efforts, the field continues to struggle to create robust, meaningful forms of science education. We argue that ‘settled expectations’ in schooling function to (a) restrict the content and form of science valued and communicated through science education and (b) locate students, particularly those from nondominant communities, in untenable epistemological positions that work against engagement in meaningful science learning. In this article we examine two episodes with the intention of reimagining the relationship between science learning, classroom teaching, and emerging understandings of grounding concepts in scientific fields – a process we call desettling. Building from the examples, we draw out some key ways in which desettling and reimagining core relations between nature and culture can shift possibilities in learning and development, particularly for nondominant students.

In spite of evidence for cultural variation in adult concepts of the biological world (i.e., folkbiological thought), research regarding the influence of culture on children’s concepts is mixed, and cultural influences on many aspects of early folkbiological thought remain underexplored. Previous research has shown that there are cultural differences in ecological reasoning and psychological closeness to nature between Menominee Native American and rural European American adults (e.g., Medin et al., 2006; Bang et al., 2007). In the present research we examined whether these cultural concepts are available at 5-7 years of age. We conducted structured interviews in which each child viewed several pairs of pictures of plants and non-human animals and were asked how or why the species (e.g., raspberries and strawberries) might go together. We found that Menominee children were more likely than European American children to mention ecological relations and psychological closeness to nature, and that they were also more likely to mimic the non-human species. There were no differences between the two communities in the number of children’s responses based on taxonomic and morphological relations. Implications for the design of science curricula are discussed.

Although there has been considerable focus on the underrepresentation of minorities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines and the need for science instruction that fosters diversity, much of the associated effort has focused on the goal of diversity and tended to assume that science and science learning are acultural. We describe a conceptual framework employed in our work with both urban and rural Native American communities that focuses on culturally based epistemological orientations and their relation to the cultural practices associated with science instruction. We summarize evidence on the efficacy of community-based science education to support the proposition for a shift in orientation toward science education from aiming to have students adopt specific epistemologies to supporting students' navigation of multiple epistemologies. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed94:1008–1026, 2010