This study addresses how to help elementary science teachers explore the uncertainty inherent in scientific activity and support elementary students to engage in more complex and authentic investigations. We describe a district partnership focused on understanding how to support elementary teachers to adapt curricula to promote science practices. We then present a close analysis of how teachers navigated ideas about uncertainty during their work exploring tools to adapt their curriculum. We argue that an essential aspect of the teachers' work was developing a more nuanced view of scientific uncertainty, including more precise goals for students' engagement in scientific activity and a repertoire of strategies for supporting students to engage with scientific uncertainty without unduly increasing uncertainty for teachers. We trace three strategies that appeared to help teachers negotiate and develop this more nuanced view: beginning with complex phenomena, iterating on investigations, and leveraging variability in students' ways of conducting investigations. The findings have implications for the design of professional development programs for elementary teachers, particularly the support that teachers might need to negotiate a nuanced set of teacher and student roles when seeking to engage students more authentically in science practices.

As science education continues to embrace science‐as‐practice, equitable science learning environments must value and leverage emergent bilingual students' ways of communicating. This study investigates the translanguaging practices of a group of elementary‐aged emergent bilingual students while they problematized electrical phenomena. Building on asset‐oriented theories for supporting student learning, I utilize translanguaging as a theoretical and pedagogical lens for understanding how emergent bilingual students leverage their full semiotic repertoires for productive disciplinary engagement. The study took place in an out‐of‐school program focused on creating opportunities for students to problematize electrical phenomena, specifically electrical resistance. I present a close analysis of students constructing models of electric flow through a circuit and how electrical resistance regulates that flow. The findings also include evidence that students engaged in different kinds of translanguaging practices when problematizing electrical phenomena and co‐constructing knowledge with each other and the instructor. Specifically, students drew from and used multiple linguistic and nonlinguistic semiotic resources for communicating their models. Finally, the findings suggest that the instructor's pedagogical moves and own translanguaging practices implicitly signaled to students when and how to participate in translanguaging practices themselves. The findings emphasize the importance of desettling what counts as productive forms of communication in science for elementary‐aged emergent bilingual students by eschewing pedagogical models that police discursive boundaries. Therefore, equitable science learning environments must create opportunities for emergent bilingual students to leverage their full semiotic repertoires for meaning‐making, by inviting and valuing multiple languages and gestures.

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OpenSciEd is an ambitious effort to implement the vision of the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards broadly across the United States. The premise of OpenSciEd is that high quality instructional materials can play a critical role in transforming science teaching and learning at a broad scale. To achieve its goal, this collaborative project is developing instructional materials for middle school science that support the shifts in practice required to achieve the outcomes called for by the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards at a large scale. The OpenSciEd Middle School Program development project is addressing the challenge of making large changes in practice at a large scale through attention to (1) who participates in design and development, and how; (2) providing explicit guidance for developers in a comprehensive design framework; and (3) a design and development process that ensures participation from the desired participants and adherence to the guidelines of the design framework. The resulting instructional materials have shown promise in external reviews and field tests, but their success in achieving the project's goals for transforming science will depend on the circumstances in which the program is implemented.

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There is a significant amount of research literature on the importance of identifying and building on students' experiences and ideas for making sense of the natural world, especially when engaging in science practices. Simultaneously, approaches to creating justice‐oriented science education promote the need to focus on the diverse sense‐making repertoires that students, especially those from historically marginalized communities, bring to science classrooms. However, when it comes to emergent bi/multilingual students, science education has favored narrow definitions of what ways of communicating are seen as productive for figuring out natural phenomena, privileging English‐based academic vocabulary. In this article, we investigate the myriad conceptual and semiotic resources that third‐grade emergent bilingual students developed and used when explaining sound production. Additionally, we explore how students investigated the sounds produced by a string instrument and unpacked the how and whys that give rise to the pitch of the sounds they heard. Our analyses indicate that: (1) students created mechanistic explanations that identified how changes to the salient physical features of strings affected the pitch of the sounds; (2) students created and laminated multiple semiotic resources when sharing their observations and explanations, particularly sound symbolisms; and (3) students navigated both semiotic convergence and divergence as they worked toward conceptual convergence. Based on our findings, we argue that justice‐oriented science learning environments must become spaces where emergent bilingual students can build on all their conceptual, semiotic, and cultural resources, without being policed, as they engage science practices.

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