This exploratory project considers the use of wonder as a pedagogical tool with preservice elementary teachers (PSETs). An ongoing vexation facing science teacher educators is helping future elementary teachers overcome anxiety and negative associations with science due to their own school science experiences, while simultaneously encouraging innovative and ambitious teaching practice. Utilizing wonder as a pedagogical tool for emotional and aesthetic engagement with science holds promise as an entry point to connect future teachers with meaningful science content and practice. The link between wonder and science is well‐articulated by successful scientists throughout history, and yet is rarely employed explicitly within elementary or teacher education science learning contexts. Forging a pedagogy of wonder demands connection to the emotive embodiment of science as a uniquely human process that nurtures our intense need to know. This qualitative case study is an effort to better understand if utilizing pedagogy intentionally focused on wonder could impact PSETs’ perceptions of science and scientific thinking. This paper describes the key findings that emerged while utilizing pedagogy steeped in wonder with PSETs, and the degree to which engaging with wonder impacted their perceptions of science and their future science teaching. This research supports the critical role that wonder could play in changing PSETs’ relationship with science and assisting them in the development of the pedagogical courage necessary to envision possibilities beyond their past experiences.

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In poetic dialogue with BecomingAlivewithinScienceEducation(Research):ThinkingwithLifeHistory(ies),BodiesandStickiness, stories of bodying and body(ies) of work are playfully explored.

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Wonder is an elusive yet ever-present dynamic phenomenon that deserves more attention in (science) education. What might wonder have to do with critiquing science (as the hegemonic and “neutral” discipline it has become) and living out a more life-affirming and anti-racist vision of science education? In this chapter I share a meta-assemblage research-creation: a researcher-created experimental exhibit of found poetic data assemblages about wonder, joy, Black life, neurodiversity, love, science, and science education. The intention of this meta-assemblage research-creation is to explore the affective flows of the phenomenon of wonder, while also inviting consideration of how the multiple forces and co-components of the body(ies) assembled here move together in an uneasy and historically traceable tension. These co-movements suggest how “traditional” science and school science education are not only complicit with, but also may be directly implicated as primary protagonists in the violent anti-Black racism and planet-wide suffering happening today. A more wonder-filled approach to science education may be necessary now more than ever.