Highlights Rehearsals of teaching practice function as a bridge from methods to the classroom. Organizational tools help increase the visual representations during discussions. Elements of framing and closing discussions are taken up less to the classroom. Talk moves are taken up extensively in rehearsals and the classroom. Explicit representations of practice are most often taken up by novice teachers.

STEM education has received attention both as a reform pedagogy and as a public means for economic growth and national security. Yet, despite this attention, clarity about what "counts" as STEM and how the individual disciplines relate to an integrated approach remains ambiguous. This article elicits the conceptions about what constitutes STEM education from middle grade teachers across the United States who teach a STEM discipline. Based on coded interviews and drawn conceptual models, participating teachers were more likely to describe essential aspects of integrated STEM found in the literature, but when asked to draw their conception of STEM education in their context, they often represented less ambitious conceptions.Furthermore, nontraditional subjects like engineering and technology were sometimes represented in subordinate ways to traditional subjects like science and mathematics. These findings have implications for preparing teachers to engage students in integrated STEM learning experiences as well as policy implications for what requirements must be in place to fund new STEM learning opportunities. K E Y W O R D Sinquiry/discovery, learning processes, professional development, science/science education, teachers and teaching A Research to Practice article based on this article can be found alongside the electronic version at

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This mixed-methods study examines the implications of using the tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) to design an elementary science lesson grounded in four virtual reality (VR) videos. Given the need for additional understandings of how elementary science educators can infuse cultural relevance alongside content development, this study illuminates how designing for CRP can utilize VR as a pedagogical platform to bridge science instruction and students’ lived experiences. Using pre- and post-attitudinal surveys (n=145) and post interviews (n=48), we examined students’ perceptions of a single virtual reality lesson about energy and food chains. The data suggest that learning through a CRP-based VR design (CRP-VR) enhanced students’ perception of the connection between the science content and its socio-political application to social justice issues. Implications highlight the potential of leveraging VR technology as a means to provide science instruction that explicitly affords students the opportunity to connect content learning and social action.

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