A Call for the Collective Development of Practices and Tools to Support Culturally and Critically Ambitious Teacher Education

Bibliographic Data

ID21392615
AuthorsHeather Johnson (0000-0003-4311-6065, Vanderbilt University Nashville Tennessee USA), Hank Johnson (Vanderbilt University), Matthew Kloser (0000-0002-4902-9854, University of Notre Dame Indiana USA), Kirsten Mawyer (0000-0002-5069-4261, University of Hawaiʻi Hawaii USA), Scott Mcdonald (0000-0001-9887-7481, Pennsylvania State University Pennsylvania USA, corresponding author), David Stroupe (0000-0002-3471-0049, University of Utah Utah USA)
Year2026
Volume110
Issue4
Pages996-1000
Publication date2026-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueScience Education (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0036-8326 • E-ISSN: 1098-237X
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/sce.70064
OpenAlexW7148776717
LanguageEN
References cited18

Contemporary justice-focused science teacher education—education that empowers students with the knowledge and skills to challenge and address social inequities (Lee and Grapin 2025)—faces two immense challenges. First, opportunities for new teachers to consider how pedagogy and social justice are inherently linked have been constrained both by existing school culture and, increasingly, through state and federal legislation put in place to limit equity, diversity, and social justice education within schools (Woo et al. 2024). Second, there is a long-standing problem of teacher education programs working in relative isolation, which produces idiosyncratic and siloed knowledge, practices, and structures for supporting teacher learning (Grossman 2018). These challenges result in a failure to create a shared understanding of key constructs and practices and create a teacher education knowledge desert with small, separate oases of innovation leading to less effective means for improving teacher education. While attempts to solve analogous problems in fields such as medical education have been credited with more common training and an overall higher quality formation experience, this work has been problematized for destructive aspects of mass standardization, particularly for physicians of Color (Beck 2004; Laws 2021). To address these challenges and grow as a field, we propose that the field of (science) teacher education engage in cross-institutional research and practical collaborations that embrace the significant differences between programs. We suggest a new paradigm involving multiple institutional collaborations with attention to recognizing the dignity and necessity of place-based decision-making, drawing on the culture and history of specific teacher education communities and institutional contexts while also working across sites to create a shared language and vision of professional work designed to be useful across programs and while remaining responsive to local needs. This paper uses science teacher education as a case to highlight the possibilities within the broader teacher education paradigm. We first describe our theoretical foundations for teacher learning and an overview of an equity-focused framework for science education that has the potential to serve as the anchor for developing our common language, tools, and practices. Second, we outline the challenges that currently prevent a shared vision focused on equity and justice across institutions. Third, we present a vision of the possible by outlining ways in which disciplinary methods courses can be a first locus for developing teachers' critical consciousness, simultaneously with learning disciplinary instructional practices. Furthermore, we outline ways in which teacher educators across diverse institutions and programmatic structures can collaborate to create common experiences and language augmented by programmatic diversity. We conclude by outlining critical research needs in this space to prepare generations of pre-service teachers (PSTs) that remain committed to social justice in their classrooms. Several challenges constrain a shared vision of teacher education. For instance, a programmatic disconnect often exists between courses designed to develop PSTs' vision of equity and justice and the methods courses designed to develop their teaching practice. Teacher educators frequently ask PSTs to examine issues of equity and justice in terms of access, opportunity, and achievement, as well as attend to power, identity, and sociopolitical contexts as they learn to design classroom environments (Erickson and Gutierrez 2002). Yet such conversations are often confined to “foundations” classes, courses focused on classroom management, or courses specifically focused on social justice. Thus, conversations about power and equity are frequently disconnected from discipline-specific methods courses in which PSTs learn about the daily professional work of teaching (Calabrese Barton and Tan 2020). Despite many possibilities for conversations across courses, PSTs are often asked to independently make complex connections between social justice and their disciplinary instruction, resulting in fragmentation and incoherence in the preparation program for future teachers, specifically around cultural and critical educational issues. A second challenge is that our field does not currently have shared language, practices, and tools to guide teacher preparation programs. Thus, individual teacher preparation programs are often idiosyncratic, and when they innovate aspects of preservice teacher education, they do so in isolation. Communities and professions grow as practitioners and researchers develop shared language, practices, and tools that can be used, adapted, and iterated collectively across sites of work. Without these common artifacts and discourses, the field cannot focus on common problems of practice, either in preservice teacher education programs or within preK-12 schools themselves. As a result, efforts to shape equitable classrooms are slowed or constrained by the vastly different images of instruction across sites of teacher preparation (Grossman and Pupik Dean 2019; Shah 2021). We argue that isolation is not an innate property of teacher education. Rather, persistent myths about the impossibility of overcoming or controlling individual teacher education programs' variable structures have limited cross-site collaborations and empirical exploration. While we know individual programs can succeed, such solitary efforts deny opportunities for collective learning and growth across the field. We know that designing better teacher preparation programs has been part of national conversations for over a century, yet there has been almost no systematic research focusing on teacher preparation pedagogies that are most productive in developing complex instruction that aims to disrupt inequities in classrooms across multiple institutional contexts (Fraser 2007). Therefore, we call for a reframing of the institutional and structural diversity of teacher education programs as an asset to understanding how individual programs contextualize similar teacher education pedagogies. We suggest a conversation and an associated broad research program across sites of teacher preparation that intentionally embraces variability in program structure to explore the impact of a shared pedagogical framework and set of practices. Our work in science learning environments takes a sociocultural perspective on learning (Lave and Wenger 1991), and views knowing as socially negotiated and constructed by the participants in a dynamic process of science (or science teaching)-in-the-making (Kelly et al. 1998). Moving the field away from less idiosyncratic and toward more coherent language and practices that can help elevate instructional practice across, but responsive to, multiple contexts requires cross-institutional research and collaboration. These partnerships can create foundational tools and tasks that can be adapted to meet local needs, but only if ideas and discourse can diffuse and be taken up across institutional boundaries. To develop a critical equity perspective, PSTs must first conceptualize science classrooms as places where all students can experience science learning in ways that are relevant to their own worlds and cultures. Critical and Cultural approaches to Ambitious Science Teaching (C2AST) is a framework designed to support PSTs in “grounding learning opportunities in students' cultures and identities and work toward culturally and linguistically sustaining practices” (Thompson et al. 2021, p. 59) as a means of “increas[ing] the capacity for everyone to participate in meaningful learning activity” (Windschitl et al. 2018, p. 12). This framework provides a foundation for the vision of the science teacher education practices we hope to describe. Learning to teach through a C2AST lens requires a praxis bridge between teacher education programs and the implementation of those ideas in nuanced and idiosyncratic contexts of individual schools (Darling-Hammond et al. 2009). Forms of teacher education have attempted to address this concern with a shift toward practice-based approaches focusing on the enactment of core teaching practices (Grossman et al. 2010; Zeichner 2012) to move beyond “application of theory” approaches (Zeichner 2010, p. 91). Creating practice-based science teacher preparation programs that center social justice requires teacher educators to make visible the inequities that arise in classrooms, which tend to prioritize the memorization and recitation of information, and to instead use C2AST to reframe those practices. Developing a C2AST framing and associated practices requires well-designed learning opportunities for PSTs (Kavanagh and Danielson 2020). Specifically, we argue that PSTs must be provided with experiences with practice and space to negotiate the meaning of those practices. For example, these might include approximations of practice (e.g., rehearsals, see Kazemi et al. 2016) and deconstructions of practice, such as video analysis of teaching (both practicing teachers as well as PSTs' own rehearsals). PSTs need opportunities to examine the ways students express their thinking and ways of knowing in the context of purposeful instructional moves and classroom interactions. PSTs' participation in such practice-based teacher educators' pedagogies supports them in developing a deeper understanding of C2AST while illuminating how instructional decisions support some students and constrain opportunities for others. Examining how C2AST tools and practices are implemented across diverse contexts provides an opportunity for the field to see if and how practice-based teacher education pedagogies might help PSTs learn to notice and attend to student thinking and ways of knowing in critical and culturally focused ways throughout their initial licensure experiences and into their first years of teaching. To accomplish this goal, it is necessary to address challenges that have tempered progress as a field. We propose an exploration of C2AST across multiple teacher education programs as one model for providing more unity across teacher educators more broadly. C2AST addresses the first challenge of teacher education by explicitly integrating issues of equity and pedagogy through its inherent positioning of children as sensemakers, as well as its foundational approach to raising questions about who science is for, who has been marginalized in science, and how students and teachers exercise their agency to challenge the status quo. In particular, the language exists for exploration and extension in individual sites around a set of four foundational principles: (1) Recognizing our own and other's worlds and developing critical consciousness; (2) Learning about and prioritizing students' communities and cultures; (3) Challenging the culture of science through social and restorative justice; and (4) Designing for each student's full participation in the culture of science. While teacher educators across multiple sites may vary in their approaches, pedagogies, and assessments, these principles provide both language and a set of non-negotiables for what must be addressed. C2AST is also well-positioned to address the second challenge of building common language, tools, and practices because of its roots in core instructional practices (i.e., Ambitious Science Teaching, see Windschitl et al. 2012, 2018). To highlight how a cross-institutional collaboration using C2AST offers opportunities for collaboration and growth, we offer a glimpse into how two of the authors situated in radically different contexts (Hawaiʻi and Tennessee) worked together to develop place-based immersive introductory experiences that attend to culture, history, community, and institutional context: When we first started working with AST, our shared goal was to provide our PSTs with experiences that would help them learn how to center student ideas and sensemaking in their teaching. The majority of our PSTs rarely experienced science in ways that treated their ideas as valuable resources for learning, so we collaboratively designed an immersive secondary experience. We showed our PSTs images of dew-covered grass in the early morning alongside the same grass later in the day without dew, and asked them to grapple with the questions: where does the dew come from? And, where does the dew go? While we found this to be effective in terms of introducing discipline-focused teaching practices of AST, it was inadequate to help our PSTs cultivate a critical equity lens they needed to reimagine science teaching and learning in culturally expansive ways (Bang et al. 2017; Calabrese Barton and Tan 2020; Stroupe 2021). While our coursework was challenging PSTs to explore the social, cultural, and historical contexts of students' communities and identify assets to cultivate in the design of learning opportunities, they were not translating what they learned into their teaching. Analysis of the lessons our PSTs were developing revealed that while they were centering student ideas and sensemaking, they were still prioritizing ways of thinking about the world that limited opportunities for their students to draw on lived experiences as productive resources for equitable sensemaking. We asked ourselves what we, as instructors, needed to do differently if we wanted to help our PSTs make culture, place, and social justice important in their teaching. We realized that our shared immersive experience about dew was not providing an explicit model of how to operationalize that knowledge in the experiences they were designing and teaching. Working collaboratively, we were able to use C2AST principles to develop immersive experiences specific to our contexts. In Hawaiʻi, that meant making space for exploring Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Kanaka; Native Hawaiian) ways of knowing and doing science, as well as examining ongoing injustices of settler colonialism on education (Taira 2020). This resulted in Mawyer developing an immersive cultural and place-based secondary science unit on Kaulana Mahina (phases of the moon through a Kanaka lens). This unit partners Kanaka lunar knowledge with western conceptualizations of the lunar cycle to engage students in thinking about the question: No ke aha mai, ua ʻokoʻa ka mahina ke nānā aku (Why does the moon look different?) Specifically, this desettled unit incorporates kilo, Kanakasense abilities (Oliveira 2014), as well as ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language) and aloha ʻāina (care and stewardship of place). Since beginning to use her unit on kaulana mahina, Mawyer has noticed a dramatic shift in the design of PSTs' lessons to center Kanaka ways of knowing and doing. In Nashville, Johnson's PSTs are generally not from the Nashville area. Yet, the rapidly growing population of the city is felt everywhere as new developments are constantly changing the landscape of the city. To help teacher candidates develop stronger connections to Nashville, Johnson's immersive experience started with recent news articles about the disappearing tree canopy in Nashville. They discussed why having tree canopies is important, who benefits from having tree canopies, why and where this is happening, and the potential long-term consequences of this trend. As part of the experience, the class explored data of Nashville's tree canopy overlayed with lenses of race, socioeconomic status, and disease (Smith et al. 2024). Patterns quickly emerged that surfaced inequities with regard to where tree canopies are located and thus, who benefits from them. This led to discussions about what kind of action we can take as future teachers to promote environmental justice. Both of these immersive learning experiences used C2AST principles to unpack what it means to take an equitable and ambitious approach to teaching science. Even though Hawaiʻi and Tennessee are very different, Mawyer & Johnson used this common focus on culture, language, and place, and shared understandings of AST and C2AST to support each other in developing place-based learning experiences. Their collaboration helped develop discourses and tools that were similar enough to prime learning with and from each other, but specific enough to support PSTs in their unique contexts. Now more than ever, science teacher educators can draw strength in thinking together about how to navigate challenging sociopolitical contexts and cultivate rich linguistic and cultural repertoires of practice through the design of immersive learning opportunities for PSTs. The field of teacher education will only be able to leverage a common language if researchers are able to explore whether, when, and how discourse, tools, and practices can diffuse across and be shaped by interactions among multiple institutions. Understanding complex learning environments across contexts requires looking at research methodology through new eyes and the patience to develop claims over time, rather than in one study. We suggest this work start with small groups of institutions that can foster productive collaboration and identify “pain points” for a common language and tools that are raised by various programmatic constraints. This reflects an exploratory and design-based (Fishman et al. 2013) approach as an alternative to the history of single institutional field-based investigation. Multi-site collaborations of this size could capture significant diversity in program structure, geography, and culture while allowing for the iterative collection of evidence that can lead to broader studies based on the design principles that can be developed. More importantly, the methodological approach to this work is countercultural in many traditions, as we see the work necessarily reframing the diverse institutional structures and backgrounds as an asset, not a deficit, to the methodological rigor. The work should be done across institutions that serve different populations, located in different geographic locations, and composed of different program structures. As we can see in Mawyer and Johnson's example, diversity across programs can be significant, but such diversity allows for the methodological richness of a cross-institutional study. In the long view, these are not variables that can or should be controlled. Understanding where language, tasks, and practices do and do not resonate across various programs can lead to new theoretical understandings of what can be achieved when institutions identify foundational design principles that can be adapted and evolve in ways that best serve PSTs and the students they teach. Looking across multiple university-based teacher preparation contexts, how and why do PSTs' C2AST practice shift over time? Namely, during: Science methods course sequences; Within practicum experiences; Across their first year as teachers of record in a science classroom? What are the design features of science methods courses across contexts that influence PSTs’ development of C2AST practice? How does our understanding of well-articulated sets of teaching practice evolve as we understand their use and enactment across contexts? What professional learning practices are productive for supporting cross-institutional teacher education learning and developing a shared knowledge base for teacher education from the diverse enactment of common practices and tools? To address these types of questions, we call for increased avenues of funding to provide three important trajectories for collaboration. First, funding for conferences and gatherings can bring together teacher educators from a variety of program structures and institutional contexts to identify opportunities for cross-institutional collaboration and identify a priori potential obstacles and potential solutions to the work. Second, building on those conferences, the most significant need will be taking the ideas to the field and engaging in the work of collaboration and associated research. We see the need for initial, significant funding for institutional groups that are committed to collaborating and can produce evidence of processes for cross-institutional collaborations to shape teacher education, as well as outcomes, roadblocks, and unforeseen successes. Finally, if we intend to see permanent changes in practice, this work should take the long view and allow for data collection through the teacher education experience and into the first years of teaching. This commentary raises questions about seemingly false assumptions that collaboration and shared language and tools will necessarily create teaching practices that are rigid and to needs and contexts of different teacher preparation programs. Our that all teachers can move toward more equitable and science education that all students as We propose that the field must move with the of developing a common language, tools, and practices that can meet the diverse needs of learning at different We existing challenges and a vision of the possible through the of cross-site implementation of we questions for the field and identify future funding that can provide evidence about effective science teacher education for equity and diversity across a of teacher this can provide a model of teacher education practices and tools that can be shared and as a to everyone in teacher education. and and and The authors no of

Faculty Development · Professional development · Science education · Student teacher · Teacher education · Teaching method · Critical Race Theory in Education · Education Discipline and Inequality · Teacher Education and Leadership Studies