In the past two decades, educational researchers across disciplines have increasingly attended to equity as a priority (e.g., Hess & Noguera, 2021). In this paper, we examine how researchers and teachers in a multi-year professional development program shifted their conceptualizations of equity. Following Grapin et al. (2023), we ground our analysis in two conceptualizations of equity that exist across fields: equity-as-access (learners should have access to disciplinary knowledge, practices, and career paths) and equity-as-transformation (learners should transform what it means to learn and participate in disciplines). We characterize our research efforts as “attending to equity as access while pushing toward equity as transformation” (Grapin et al., 2023, p. 6) in order to avoid “pitting [the conceptions against each other]” (Gutierrez, 2002, p. 148) while at the same time acknowledging the outsized influence of equity-as-access on research with minoritized studentsincluding Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students, who are subject to persistent marginalization in US schools at the intersection of multiple identity markers (e.g., language, race, gender; Takeuchi et al., 2022).

In this study, we describe a professional development (PD) design initially intended to support equitable science teaching and learning by focusing on representations (e.g., drawings, graphs, text). This initial framing did not distinguish between conceptions of equity-as-access versus equity-as-transformation in teachers’ work with representations. Catalyzed by teachers’ request for PD focused on multilingual learners (MLs), we noticed aspects of our design that offered only images of equity-as-access in relation to engagement with representational forms and modalities. In response, we designed activities for teachers that offered space and resources for considering equity-as-transformation perspectives in practice. As a case study (Yin, 2014), we describe how we PD activities and facilitation strategies to integrate transformative conceptualizations of equity. Drawing on data from our ongoing PD project, we ask: How did redesigns (in activities and in facilitation) support K-4 teachers in taking up equity-as-transformation perspectives? From our analysis, we identify design features and facilitation strategies that could inform future PD intended to support equity-as-transformation perspectives.

Literature review

We situate our research question in science education research by briefly describing (a) conceptions of equity in science education, (b) the role of ideological sensemaking in teachers’ learning about equity, and (c) the role of professional development in teachers’ ideological sensemaking.

Equity in science education

In science education, multiple, sometimes-overlapping conceptions of equity exist. Secada (2008) outlined three conceptions of equity that surfaced in the field. He grouped conceptions of equity into the following categories: socially enlightened self-interest, representation of underrepresented groups, and expressions of social justice. These conceptions of equity were taken up in the Next Generation Science Standards in terms of equity-as-access (see NRC, 2012, p. 278, Box 11–1, “What is Equity?”)—each category was used to describe broadening participation in traditional disciplinary fields. Enlightened self-interest was framed as a way to recruit underrepresented groups to STEM careers, and representation and expressions of social justice were framed as ways to attend to students’ “cultural funds of knowledge” so that they could be “transformed into scientific concepts over time” (NRC, 2012, p. 284). Students’ resources were therefore framed as a means to an end of disciplinary learning, rather than as ways to critically transform disciplinary learning by positioning students with epistemic authority to contribute to and shape science learning (Warren et al., 2020).

In the context of out-of-school science education, Philip and Azevedo (2017) noted that these recent standards-based reforms in science education relied on dehistoricized and depoliticized meanings of equity, continuing to focus on access rather than transformation. A National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (NASEM) report (2021) built on Philip and Azevedo’s (2017) conceptualizations of equity in order to analyze literature about early childhood science education. The report argued all conceptualizations of equity are necessary: equity-as-access supports short-term achievement, whereas equity-as-transformation disrupts systemic oppression in the long-term. Yet, the report found that while significant research has focused on equity-as-access, there has been relatively little research in terms of equity-as-transformation. A wealth of research has explored examples of teaching and learning that embodies equity-as-transformation pedagogies (e.g., Bang et al., 2018; Warren et al., 2020), and several studies attend to the importance of ideologies about equity in teacher sensemaking (e.g., Daniel et al., 2023; Louie, 2020; Philip, 2011). However, research about designing to support ideological sensemaking with teachers is relatively nascent (e.g., Mendoza et al., 2021; Patterson Williams et al., 2020; Shah & Coles, 2020). To trace ideological shifts, we focus in this paper on the PD community’s understanding of equity, rather than on teachers’ pedagogical actions in relation to their understanding.

Ideological sensemaking and rearticulation in teacher professional learning

Learning Sciences research has explored relationships between teachers and ideologies, specifically on how dominant ideologies that drive inequity can be disrupted through teacher sensemaking (e.g., Horn, 2007; Louie, 2018; Philip, 2011). While ideologies themselves are “not necessarily good and not necessarily bad” (Louie, 2020, p. 3), dominant ideologies consist of the commonsense, unmarked norms that reproduce societal inequity. To disrupt these ideologies and work towards transformative perspectives of equity in teaching and learning, teachers need to be positioned as agents of change (not reproduction), explicitly naming dominant ideologies and noticing them in real-world teaching contexts (e.g., Mendoza et al., 2021; Patterson Williams et al., 2020; Shah & Coles, 2020). This requires sensemaking towards rearticulating ideologies.

We define ideologies as socially constructed “mental frameworks…[through which we] make sense of, define, figure out and render intelligible how society works” (Hall, 1996, pp. 25–26). These ideologies are not static across individuals, time, or contexts, but are open to change through ideological sensemaking resulting in new interpretations of the social world (Philip, 2011; Philip et al., 2018). As Daniel et al. (2023) describe: “Ideological sensemaking unfolds at the micro level within interactional groups as individuals take stances, verbalizing their sensemaking dependent on their positionality (Philip, 2011)” (p. 5). Here, Daniel et al. (2023) define conceptual stances (e.g., ideas, propositions, relations; distinct from prior work on stances, e.g., Goffman, 1974; Goodwin, 2007a, b) to recognize how conceptual stances are made observable within verbal utterances and physical forms of engagement (i.e., multimodality; Goodwin, 2018; Hall et al., 2010). Ideologies can be reified or changed through the interactional process of taking a stance in turns-of-talk with others. Through this process, a group of teachers may shift their collective understanding of children in relation to science learning, including those from marginalized communities, in ways that “challenge social forms of power” (Philip, 2011, p. 3010). Thus, collaborative processes of sensemaking allows “collectively rearticulated meanings to emerge” (Philip, 2011, p. 301) through resisting deficit narratives within communities.

In the present case study, we focus on the PD activities that cultivate opportunities for ideological rearticulation. We are specifically interested in opportunities for teachers to name and recognize the importance of equity-as-transformation in addition to equity-as-access.

Professional development activities that support ideological rearticulation

Professional development supports researchers and teachers to reticulate ideologies through reflection and collaboration. Philip (2011) demonstrates the importance of critical reflection in enabling teachers to recognize and rearticulate deficit ideologies—a finding that aligns with research about supporting equitable teaching through reflection (e.g., Louie et al., 2021; Shah & Coles, 2020). Patterson Williams and colleagues (2020) offer an example with their study about how reflection through discourse can help teachers develop an “inner witness” to notice dimensions of equity as part of their teaching practice. Burgess and Patterson Williams (2022) note that reflection must occur across scales: macro (role of ideologies), micro (local interactions), and meso (sociopolitical contexts of teaching). Beyond reflection, research highlights the role of collaboration—teachers “working with their peers to situate their learning in real practice” (Mundry et al., 2009, p. 9). Collaboration should occur in both planning for teaching and in adapting pedagogical approaches (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Loucks-Horsley et al., 2009). This collaboration supports ideological rearticulation as teachers position students’ ideas and practices as valuable resources. Following from this research, our PD includes three features to support reflection and collaboration: (1) immersive learning, (2) student work analysis, and (3) video club.

First, anchoring professional development in an immersive learning experience builds substrate (Goodwin, 2018) that can ground ideological rearticulation. Participating as students in a phenomenon-focused science lesson can help teachers build a common understanding of science and science teaching and confidence in their ability to enact similar instruction, as well as learn about science concepts and practices (Crawford, 2012; Loucks-Horsley et al., 2009; Windschitl et al., 2019).

Second, student work analysis helps teachers understand and evaluate student thinking (Little, 2004), and can help teachers recognize and create meaningful formative assessments (Aschbacker & Alonzo, 2006; Schneider & Plasman, 2011) to shift their teaching strategies in response to students’ work (Gerard et al., 2010; Ruiz-Primo & Furtak, 2007). This practice involves teachers sharing student work samples that show students’ thinking. Engaging with students’ ideas in this way may support ideological shifts about students’ thinking, including what kinds of sensemaking they are capable of and how they might express their ideas.

Third, video clubs enable teachers to attend to students’ sensemaking and engagement by offering teachers opportunities to watch and discuss moments of teaching and learning from their classrooms (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Boerst et al., 2011; Forsythe & Johnson, 2017; Sherin & Han, 2004; Sherin & van Es, 2005). In video clubs, teachers consider teacher and student interactions, learning activities, and teaching tools. Video clubs anchor teachers’ sensemaking in the complex realities of their specific classrooms (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Boerst et al., 2011; Borko et al., 2008; Roth et al., 2011), creating opportunities for teachers to rearticulate ideologies about science and student participation.

These three features were present throughout our PD design in order to support ideological sensemaking about equity. In the following section, we describe how our PD design shifted to move toward opportunities for teachers to frame equity-as-transformation.

Professional development design and shifts toward equity-as-transformation

In this section, we describe aspects of our PD design to examine how our developing understanding of ideological sensemaking shaped the ways we supported elementary teachers to take up equity-as-transformation perspectives in K-4 science professional learning. Our PD initially aimed to support young children as epistemic sensemakers in science learning by exploring multimodal representational forms (e.g., drawing, dance, talk, graphing), yet did not provide adequate tools for disrupting deficit-orientations towards many learners, particularly learners from nondominant communities (e.g., multilingual learners, immigrants, racial and ethnic oppressed communities). We describe how, through a process of iterative refinement over several years, we shifted toward designs in our PD to support an integrated and increasingly transformative perspective of science learning by providing opportunities for ideological sensemaking.

The data for this case study come from the Representations for Teachers as Learners (RepTaLs) Project, funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation. RepTaLs is a design-based research project that “engineer[s] particular forms of learning and systematically study[s] those forms of learning” within the designed context that supports them (Cobb et al., 2003, p. 9). In the case of RepTaLs, the particular form of learning is a multi-year professional development program for elementary teachers. The program was initially intended to support teachers to use representational forms to broaden all students’ participation in science learning through expanding how teachers thought about representations as productive to learning (e.g., expanding to include multimodal representations, imaginative embodiment, gesture-based representations, as well as traditional drawings, graphs, and tables). As we identified limitations of that design for attending to equity, we developed specific understandings of both equity-as-access and equity-as-transformation that guided shifts in our design and led to new equity-based outcomes, namely teachers working with equity-as-transformation (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Linking PD summer 1 and 2 design features, facilitation moves, and equity-based outcomes

Full size image

Figure 1 highlights the shifts made between PD summers 1 and 2. In Summer 2, we continued to implement the Puddles Immersive Learning Sequence, Shared Reflection activities, and Collaborative Planning. In Summer 2 we also introduced two new activities. Each activity was paired with specific facilitation moves to support teacher sensemaking (Language Storybook was paired with a conversation about recognizing multilingual learners’ assets; Jonathan and the Sun was paired with a conversation about surfacing deficit ideologies grounded in teachers’ experiences). We describe these designs in greater detail next.

Initial design: drawing on best practices for centering students in science teaching

The first iteration was implemented in May and July of 2019 (See Table 1 for a Sequence and Summary of Activities). The first 5-day summer workshop was grounded in best practices for science teacher learning. It included demonstration lessons (Crawford, 2012; Grossman et al., 2009) based on Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) units (Colley, 2019; Tools for Ambitious Science Teaching, 2015). An expert science teacher educator facilitated the immersive AST experience (Puddles; Colley, 2019), including an anchoring phenomenon (picture of a puddle), driving questions (“Where does the puddle come from? Where does the puddle go?), and several activities to explore aspects of the phenomenon organized on a summary chart (e.g., initial model solo than collaborative, measuring evaporation over time, observing steam, storybooks, magnet model). Then several educators on the RepTaLs team facilitated reflection about the immersive experience including exploring multimodal representational forms (e.g., embodiment, diagrams, songs, talk, text) and tools to support multilingual learners to engage with these representational forms during science inquiry. Teachers also had time to plan their own lesson sequences, providing them with opportunities for active, collaborative learning (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017; Garet et al., 2001) supported by professionals with in-depth pedagogical content knowledge (Grossman et al., 2009; Loucks-Horsley et al., 2009; Oehrtman et al., 2009).

Table 1 Overview of summer PD 1 workshop
Full size table

During the summer PD and four subsequent academic-year PD sessions, teachers had sustained opportunities for collaborative reflection. These reflection sessions were grounded in perspectives of young children as capable science learners; for example, the perspective that young children are capable of engaging in complex science practices (see Daniel et al., 2023), and that young children can develop and test their own individual theories to explain phenomena (see Pierson et al., 2023). In developing this professional learning community (e.g., Mensah, 2021), teachers were able to work “with their peers to situate their learning in real practice” (Mundry et al., 2009, p. 9). Specifically, each of the academic-year workshops included student work analysis (Heller et al., 2012; Langer et al., 2003; Little, 2004; Little et al., 2003) to support reflection on expansive representational forms, and video clubs to reflect on the processes of students’ sensemaking and their diverse repertoires of practice (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Sherin & Han, 2004; Sherin & van Es, 2005).

In our Findings below, we analyze conversations from these academic-year sessions, in addition to moments from summer PD, in order to explore the impact of our designs from summer PD. These data were not only used in our retrospective analysis, but also informed our redesign for Summer 2—we noticed through our analysis that the PD community was positioning only some students as competent sensemakers. Specifically, we noted instances of deficit orientations when talking about multilingual learners and a child who had recently immigrated to the U.S. (see Daniel et al., 2023 for more detail about these findings), prompting us to negotiate more clear definitions of equity for our team (framed as access versus transformation) and opportunities for sensemaking about these perspectives for teachers.

Redesign: supporting transformative perspectives of language in science classrooms

The second iteration of the RepTaLs PD was implemented in the summer of 2021 (see Table 2 for a Sequence and Summary of Activities). Members of our research team had taken on the task of considering deficit perspectives of multilingual learners given incidents of deficit-orientation in the first year of the study, leading these members to lead iterative design of professional development activities with teachers towards supporting ideological rearticulation and exploration of both equity-as-access and equity-as-transformation more broadly in our collaborative work.

Table 2 Overview of summer PD 2 workshop
Full size table

There were two parts to the Summer PD 2; our initial workshop was with returning Cohort 1 teachers, and our second workshop included activities for new and returning teachers (Cohorts 1 and 2) later in the summer. Much of the design remained the same with a few key differences related to the present case study. First, in seeking to support multilingual learners more explicitly, we introduced a Language Storybook activity (a substantial revision to the initial “Storybook” activity) during the immersive learning experience. This revised activity was taught entirely in French. The goal was to support teachers in recognizing the powerful ways they were able to understand aspects of the science phenomena and to contribute to classroom sensemaking despite not having fluent capabilities in the language of instruction—much like their own multilingual students. We included a debrief of Language Storybook before returning to the English-based Puddles activities to allow time for sensemaking about multilingual learners’ needs and resources. In this first iteration of the Language Storybook activity in June of 2021 (Summer PD 2), our debrief discussion focused mostly on abstract ideas about language ideologies, or how notions of language are constructed and positioned within sociopolitical and cultural contexts. We see these ideologies as being collaboratively constructed within interactions leading to either reification—explaining phenomenon through the lens of the constraining ideology—or towards rearticulation of ideologies—challenging constraining ideologies and putting them in a context of critical reflection that allows for more expansive interpretations of learning phenomena (see Daniel et al., 2023; Philip, 2011; Philip et al., 2018). As we will demonstrate in our analysis below, this reflection during the first Summer PD 2 workshop did not adequately disrupt teachers’ deficit ideologies, leading to reification rather than rearticulation of monolingual language ideologies and maintaining a conceptualization of equity-as-access rather than equity-as-transformation.

Therefore, in the next iteration of the Language Storybook during July of 2021 (still within the Summer PD 2 design), we introduced an additional activity to focus on understanding heterogeneity in classrooms, diverse resources, and non-traditional systems of science. We paired these with more explicit discussions of multimodal approaches to classroom sensemaking activities. Specifically, we shared with teachers a case excerpted from Warren et al. (2020) about Jonathan, an African American boy who argued that the sun was living—an idea that aligns with contemporary systems-based perspectives in science, but that was initially dismissed by Jonathan’s teacher. We chose this example to illustrate multiple pathways and endpoints for science sensemaking (e.g., the sun can be seen as living and non-living). In this next iteration of the Language Storybook activity, we included significant time for small-group discussion wherein facilitators worked to tie the discussion of big ideas to practical, real-world stories about how these issues might play out. Our goal was to support teachers to recognize the work involved in “making space” for (Haverly et al., 2020) and seeing connections between children’s everyday repertoires and collaborative science sensemaking (Warren et al., 2020) which benefits all learners, but has particular importance for those from marginalized communities. As our analysis shows, this facilitation, combined with the introduction of both the Language Storybook and the Jonathan and the Sun discussion, was more successful in shifting the PD community towards anti-deficit discussions of teaching and learning including perspectives of equity-as-transformation, particularly with regard to marginalized students and their science learning capabilities. We conjecture this is because the redesigned PD supported teachers to recognize their role in learning from students often constructed as “troublemakers”—students who shared emergent ideas or used unfamiliar language. We argue this resulted in clear moves towards more transformative perspectives of equity as teachers explored how students may contribute diverse ideas about science phenomena that are worthy of exploring in their own right (rather than merely as a step towards dominant understandings).

Method

As mentioned above, data for this case study (Yin, 2014) come from a broader design-based research study (Cobb et al., 2003) including multiple iterative refinements of a PD design supporting elementary science teachers’ learning. The project was funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and was initially designed to support center students’ multimodal sensemaking resources in science inquiry through exploring multiple representations (Pierson et al., 2023).

Recruitment and participants

After approval from the focal metropolitan school district, teachers were recruited through district-wide emails and by reaching out to principals that had previously indicated interest in professional development support from the university. When we visited schools (during faculty meetings), we pitched the project as a teacher-researcher partnership with emphasis on the expertise they brought to the study as equally important as the expertise from the university-based team. During preliminary conversations with recruited teachers, several mentioned concerns about supporting multilingual students in the district (120 + home languages were spoken by families in the district, and many students were recent immigrants). This focus drove us to discuss equity, but without clear definition in the first year of the study. By the time we recruited the second cohort, we had more clear definitions of equity for ourselves, particularly around monolingual ideologies and ideologies that constraint understandings of young children’s capabilities for engaging in science inquiry. These understandings informed the design and facilitation of the second cohort (though did not impact our recruitment) who were introduced during their summer PD experiences to ideas about equity in science designs.

Eighteen in-service teachers (Table 3) from a metropolitan public school district in the southeastern United States participated in the PD during the 2019–2022 school years. We refer to teachers using pseudonyms chosen by the participants, and we refer to facilitators using their real names (many are co-authors on this paper). All teachers taught K-4 students, and all taught science in some capacity (some were teachers of all subjects in self-contained classrooms, others were math and science specialists, and one was a librarian who supported STEM learning during and after school).

Table 3 Participants, grade level, school, and cohort
Full size table

Data sources

Data sources for the project include video recordings of summer and academic-year workshops, video observations of teachers’ lessons, and artifacts of practice including teacher planning materials and student work. For the present case study, we focused on video recordings of PD workshops and any relevant student work that was the focus of conversation during those workshops. Data come from summer workshop activities as well as academic-year PD (student work analysis and video clubs) and include approximately 140 h of video data.

Analytical processes

After collecting our data, we immediately began a process of organizing and accounting for that data. More specifically, we created content logs (Erickson & Schultz, 1997) to index video data. These records provided searchable data for all future analysis. Additionally, following workshops with teachers, we held debrief sessions with the full research team to discuss moments of success and potential challenges to be addressed in subsequent workshops and through redesign for future PD. Notes from our debriefs served as catalyst for iterative design work, through both full-team efforts and sub-team work to address specific concerns.

We began the present analysis in response to a debrief session with our team in which we noticed a moment of facilitation in an academic-year workshop that reified, rather than challenged, deficit perspectives of multilingual students (this debrief session occurred during Academic Year 1). We articulated our concerns about this moment to each other and identified other moments where we had similarly reified or overlooked deficit framing of multilingual learners, a child who had recently immigrated to the U.S., and those otherwise positioned as “troublemakers.” These moments were drawn from memory, notes taken during workshops and workshop debrief sessions, and re-visiting video of workshops with teachers. Taken together, we used these moments to develop a sensitizing concept—a lens that gave us “a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances” without so narrowly defining concepts that they became prescriptive in our data search (Blumer, 1954, p. 7). Using these moments of reified deficit framing as our sensitizing concept, we examined content logs and rough transcripts from our interactions with teachers across both summer and academic-year workshops from Year 1.

With this corpus, we began the work of progressive hypothesis refinement (Engle et al., 2014) through interaction analysis methods (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) by closely examining video, content logs, and transcripts to gain a sense of what was happening in these episodes. In this method, data is not coded in a typical way, but rather the corpus is examined through content logs to identify key episodes that help to iteratively refine the sensitizing concept (e.g., Keifert & Stevens, 2019; see also Derry et al., 2010; Jordan & Henderson, 1995). This form of coding is sometimes called macrolevel coding—a process of summarizing records at a high-level to identify collections of moments that warrant transcription and line-by-line analysis (Derry et al., 2010). Through line-by-line analysis of these episodes, we began to make connections between teachers’ sensemaking, facilitators’ moves, and design features of the professional development program as a whole. This led us to wonder how we could redesign our PD to support K-4 teachers taking up equity-as-transformation approaches in their practice.

After redesigning our PD in Year 2, we developed an additional sensitizing concept—rearticulated deficit framing, in which facilitators and teachers challenged deficit stances toward students and instead focused on students’ resources. As we made connections between teachers’ sensemaking and professional development design features in particular, we identified two sets of data in Year 2 (workshop activities) that presented interesting comparative analysis opportunities for understanding how our workshop designs supported and constrained equity-oriented sensemaking.

Thus, in this paper, data came from multiple time points in the study, and retrospective analysis occurred at multiple time points. The first set of data came from the Summer 1 PD and Academic Year 1, and it was analyzed both during Academic Year 1 and again after Academic Year 2 (in comparison with data from our redesigned PD). The second set of data came from the Summer 2 PD and Academic Year 2, and it was analyzed alongside data from Academic Year 1 following Academic Year 2. In each data set, we made connections between design features of the summer workshop and the supports and constraints teachers and facilitators faced in moving towards equity-as-transformation lenses on students’ sensemaking during academic-year workshops, thus addressing our guiding research question (How did redesigns support K-4 teachers in taking up equity-as-transformation perspectives?). Through this process, we selected several portions of these activities to highlight in the episodes presented in our findings (Table 4).

Table 4 Activities and duration for each focal episode
Full size table

Table 4 highlights the duration of each activity from across the five focal episodes as well as when during the project these episodes occurred. Our methods of video and interaction analysis (Derry et al., 2010; Jordan & Henderson, 1995) did not including coding of an entire data corpus (in our case, approximately 140 h of video data), but rather used an iterative process to identify these five episodes for close line-by-line analysis.

In the findings we present next, we begin each section highlighting connections between designed activities and facilitation moves and the resulting equity-based outcomes (see Fig. 1). In both cases, we trace sensemaking across both Summer PD workshops and subsequent academic-year workshops to consider the longitudinal implications of our summer PD designs. We also highlight equity-as-transformation perspectives, which emerged more frequently in episodes following summer 2 PD, suggesting that our design and facilitation shifts supported ideological rearticulation.

Findings

In this section, we present five episodes from across our PD spanning from Summer 2019 to Spring 2022. Initially, our PD design, intended to support “equitable” science teaching, failed to distinguish between equity-as-access versus equity-as-transformation, and therefore failed to provide the PD community with resources for rearticulating deficit ideologies. Ultimately, we show how revisions in our PD activities and facilitation strategies later supported shifts toward a more transformative image of equity science learning.

To illustrate our starting points and subsequent rearticulations, we focus first on an episode that helped us realize the need to distinguish between and support both conceptions of equity-as-access and equity-as-transformation. Specifically, we describe how supports for MLs were introduced during Summer PD 1 and the following academic year. These conversations included both expansive and constraining perspectives of MLs’ abilities in science classrooms, emphasizing an equity-as-access perspective (see Daniel et al., 2023). Then, in the following section, we describe redesigned activities enacted during Summer PD 2 to support a more transformative perspective of equity, and we show how this perspective was taken up in the following academic year.

Year 1: equity-as-access framing of multilingual learners

In Summer PD 1, we did not distinguish between equity-as-access versus equity-as-transformation, and we did not plan for a focus on multilingual learners in our PD. As described next, in response to teachers’ requests and priorities, a brief reflection activity about MLs was added to the PD. In this section, we illustrate how our equity-as-access treatment of MLs enabled the reification of deficit perspectives of MLs, prompting redesign for our Summer PD 2.

Summer PD 1: conversation about supporting multilingual learners

In this section, we describe how supporting MLs was initially introduced during Summer PD 1. This focus was added to the PD because participating teachers asked for help teaching students classified by the district as “English learners.” At the time, our research teams’ expertise was science education—not multilingual education. Thus, we invited a colleague with expertise in literacy learning, particularly with students learning English, to lead these activities. She planned to facilitate an hour-long conversation about teaching MLs, but because other activities ran long, the conversation was only 20 min. This colleague also collaborated with Ashlyn, a member of the research team who was beginning to explore translanguaging pedagogies in another project (see Grapin et al., 2023; Pierson, 2023; Pierson et al., 2021; Pierson & Grapin, 2021) to develop a tool that summarized scaffolds for supporting MLs’ participation in listening, reading, speaking, and writing.

While we conceptualized this intervention as attending to equity, we did not distinguish in our design between equity-as-access versus equity-as-transformation. As a result, we defaulted to equity-as-access perspectives by focusing on strategies to enable MLs to access normative science content. Following from this image of equity, we did not integrate multilingual experiences into these activities or provide comparable activities. Thus, while teachers were invited to imagine what the science demonstration lessons would be like from the perspective of MLs in the 20-min discussion, they did not have any shared, immersive multilingual experiences to draw on.

In their discussion of the demonstration lesson from the perspective of MLs, facilitators and participating teachers focused on “scaffolds” for “academic” English—specifically, multiple ways to represent science ideas (e.g., drawings, gesture), as well as sentence stems to help students communicate their understanding of the science concepts by speaking and writing in English. These strategies can indeed support MLs in accessing normative disciplinary content. However, a fundamental limitation of the conversation was that it privileged sensemaking expressed in English over sensemaking that leveraged students’ full linguistic and multimodal repertoires (Flores & Rosa, 2015; García & Wei, 2014). Our discussion also failed to surface and challenge deficit ideologies common in U.S. education. For example, we did not intentionally establish shared asset-based understandings of MLs or problematize the school district’s term “English learner (EL).”

Despite these limitations, there was one example of transformative perspectives introduced by the teachers. Soren, a kindergarten teacher, positioned non-linguistic representations as valid modes of reasoning and expression in science. She suggested using multiple representations so that assessments or activity designs would “not keep us from knowing what [students] do know.” In this way, Soren positioned MLs as both knowledgeable and capable of expressing their knowledge in multimodal ways, implicitly challenging the English-only ideologies prevalent in US schools (Pacheco et al., 2019). However, as we illustrate next, this foundation was insufficient to support transformative reframing of MLs’ participation when teachers engaged in subsequent workshops throughout the academic year.

Academic year 1: rainbow models and a multilingual learner’s sensemaking

The equity-as-access perspectives foregrounded in Summer PD 1 persisted during Academic Year PD 1. We argue this outcome was, in part, due to the lack of shared foundational experiences exploring the potential role of multiple languages in science learning during summer PD 1 and, in part, due to the reluctance of facilitators to push back against deficit framings of MLs and introduce transformative perspectives of equity during PD. The focal interaction for this episode occurred during student work analysis. The conversation was focused on Marie M.’s (fourth grade) student work samples: students’ initial models of an anchoring phenomenon—shining a flashlight through a glass of water to create a rainbow (see Daniel et al., 2023, for a more detailed analysis of this episode).

The group of teachers and facilitators began by reading the students’ work. When reading one student’s work, Sarah (fourth grade) said:

“I think wha-” This is my favorite thing that E- the majori- that some ELs do that I see is “I think that what is it is” you know that whole mix up. ((Several people laugh.)) Then erased it and says, “I think what it is going on is that the water in the flashlight is reflecting the water to form a rainbow in the paper.”

This statement positioned MLs’ writing as a mistake to be fixed—a deficit perspective that privileged English—rather than seeing the student’s writing, for example, as evidence of complex thinking. Sarah made her comment in a warm tone, positioning language mistakes as endearing and even comical. The group built on this stance by responding to Sarah with gentle laughter and smiles. There was potential in this moment for the facilitators to draw on a transformative perspective of equity—to focus on students’ complex thinking and contribution to classroom meaning-making with their linguistic repertoire. Instead, Facilitator Heather redirected the group to the artifacts themselves, pivoting back to the “safer ground” of science learning, rather than focusing on teachers’ interpretations of students’ linguistic assets or deficits.

This pattern was repeated later in the conversation. For instance, Marie M. implicitly ranked other languages, valuing Spanish over Swahili. She described a student, Mila, as having “no language” because she did not speak English or Spanish. We attribute this hierarchical account in part to the design of our summer PD, which did not adequately surface or address monolingual ideologies, nor did it seed transformative perspectives that frame all linguistic and semiotic resources as valuable for communication. In response, without that needed foundation, Facilitator Heather redirected the group once again to focus on student artifacts rather than challenging the statement that a student had “no language.” In response, Marie M. talked about her student, Mila, copying what other students were doing, which Sarah then described as “step one” in student sensemaking. Again, Facilitator Heather encouraged a return to focus on artifacts, rather than shifting from access toward transformation by decentering English and positioning multimodality as an equally valid approach to reasoning and expression in science.

As in the summer PD, teachers occasionally raised more transformative perspectives of students’ participation. For instance, Toni (fourth grade) suggested that students have multiple paths to participation, including “the option to draw” without requiring students to write. This suggestion reframed what counts as participation in science by putting drawing and writing on equal footing. Similarly, Jack (third grade) said that for one ML student in his classroom, “tinkering” was a form of meaningful scientific thinking. This focus on multimodality once again offered teachers a resource for more transformative perspectives of MLs’ capability in science classrooms, yet the discussion fell short of bringing these perspectives into tension with the deficit ideologies that shaped the earlier conversation.

Year 2: equity-as-transformation framing of multilingual learners in science classrooms

In response to such episodes, we redesigned our Summer PD 2. Based on our analysis of Summer PD 1 above, we developed immersive multilingual activities from an equity-as-transformation perspective that both challenged ideologies about science and recognized MLs’ assets (as well as the assets of students from other racially and culturally marginalized backgrounds). Below, we describe redesign activities and moments from the first Summer PD 2 (cohort 1), the second Summer PD 2 (cohorts 1 and 2), and teacher sensemaking during a subsequent academic-year workshop.

Summer PD 2: first storybo ok iteration and academic language

To offer facilitators and teachers resources for developing transformative perspectives of language and science, during Summer PD 2, we included an immersive multilingual experience (“Language Storybook”) that teachers participated in as learners. We had previously included a storybook activity during the immersive Puddles sequence in Summer PD 1 in English, and we decided that making those storybooks into the French Storybook activity might support teachers to recognize how much they could learn without speaking the language of instruction (French), thereby supporting recognition of multilingual learners’ assets. However, in the first iteration of this activity, we did not adequately support teachers in connecting these experiences to their own planning and teaching. Below, we describe how facilitators and teachers debriefed the Language Storybook design. Though these conversations were intended to support transformative perspectives, they at times reified equity-as-access perspectives.

In the debrief conversation, teachers at times highlighted the transformative power of multimodal representations in supporting engagement. For example, Soren noticed the “power of learning the words in context” rather than front-loading vocabulary, and Jack valued Facilitator Bethany’s exaggerated gestures “showing you what the word would do.” Jack reflected that these representations are legitimate forms of reasoning and expression in science:

The representation is so important in the sense of giving kids freedom…To me, I can’t express how valuable that’s become…sometimes on paper, sometimes in pantomime, sometimes with objects, whatever it is, they’re doing the learning and growing and showing.

While teachers at times challenged the privileged status of English talk and text, constraining perspectives about “academic” or “appropriate” language as the endpoint of science learning persisted (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Teachers expressed tensions between Facilitator Bethany’s multimodal approach and the state assessments. To bridge this tension, Kourtney explained that multimodal strategies, introduced as a way to challenge English-only ideologies about science learning, could serve as an approach to “keep the vocab up,” connecting the strategies instead to an equity-as-access end goal:

Standardized testing tests their English knowledge and the world that they live in. Even looking at examples from [the state test], two of my kids have never been to a beach before. They need so much information. You can decode all you want, but if they don’t have knowledge about the world, they can’t comprehend what they are reading about.

By advocating for multimodality in this way, Kourtney positioned standardized testing as one goal of science learning, so that students could use their knowledge to successfully decode and interpret state assessment passages. These goals are reinforced by K-12 institutions yet can be harmful for minoritized students (Bang et al., 2012). Thus, while this discussion helped teachers challenge monolingual ideologies in some ways, teachers emphasized that at the end of the year, they (and their students) would still be assessed based on their knowledge of English and dominant-culture experiences, privileging equity-as-access perspectives in these conversations.

On the following day, teachers continued to emphasize the value of multimodal representations, but only as a scaffold for “academic language,” drawing on institutional, hierarchical (Louie, 2020) language that positioned MLs as deficient. For instance, Marie M. discussed how representations could enable students to share “their own academic language” regarding phenomena, which would be helpful for a “level 0” student who “had no language.” Here, Marie M. paradoxically noted the value of students’ language while positioning students’ language as less-than English, a perspective likely influenced by the districts’ terminology (“level 0”). Concerned about this explicit deficit framing (from Marie and other teachers), Facilitator Bethany asked teachers to consider the term “academic language,” including how this term might make space or limit space for students’ questions, ideas, and resources. This high-level prompt was intended to help teachers view “academic language” from a critical perspective, but instead led to teachers describing academic English as an essential goal for science instruction, especially for students classified as ELs. Later in the day, the research team tried again to problematize academic language, suggesting that there are multiple goals for science education (both equity-as-access and equity-as-transformation). Teachers seemed uncomfortable with this shift; they primarily remained silent in response.

This experience somewhat supported our conjecture that the Language Storybook activity helped teachers see students’ multimodal and multilingual resources as assets. However, the activity did not help the PD community challenge the privileged status of English in science education. Interventions in the discussion from the research team also did not support this rearticulation. We argue that this is because these conversations occurred at an abstract ideological level. Rather than helping teachers work through new perspectives in the context of specific examples, researchers instead countered teachers’ perspectives by offering opposing claims. Perhaps because they were unsure of how to integrate these stances with their classroom experiences, teachers remained silent.

Summer PD 2: second workshop introduces Jonathan and the sun conversation and facilitators’ tailored responses

Based on the episode described above, we once again modified our professional development to enable teachers to unpack equity-as-access and equity-as-transformation perspectives with regard to MLs and other students often marginalized in science classrooms. In the second workshop of the Summer 2 design, both returning and new teachers had the opportunity to debrief Language Storybook experience in relation to a new activity, exploring the “Jonathan and the Sun” case described in the Design section above. We developed the Jonathan and the Sun activity as a means of explicitly calling out deficit-based perspectives and facilitating teachers’ sensemaking in ways that led to more equity-as-transformation perspectives throughout the rest of the PD. In this way, our design created spaces for teachers to unpack their shared multilingual experience during PD and their broader experiences as teachers and learners in the context of transformative discourse about what counts as learning and how to respond to students sharing ideas and language that may seem at the time to be “a problem.” During these conversations, teachers shifted perspectives about students, as well as about science and language teaching and learning more broadly. Below, we present two examples of these ideological shifts: one that reframed the construct of the “problem child” in a small group discussion, and one that reframed the resources and goals that teachers considered legitimate for science teaching and learning in a whole group discussion.

In a small group, Kwin (Kindergarten) tried on the idea of taking up non-dominant perspectives (like calling the sun “living”). She suggested that teachers might write these ideas on the board to give “voice” to students. Referencing an example from Christine (third grade; the idea that the wind came from the trees), Kwin said:

If [Christine] was the problem child, that’s one of those things that you can like, put on your board and give them voice where maybe that will solve some of the problems...to where you can kinda give them a little credit.

With this comment, Kwin explored the importance of giving voice to students (even to the “problem child”), even though she did not express a belief that the epistemic contribution is valuable to collaborative sensemaking. Although the notion of “problem child” is deficit-based, Kwin was moving towards the idea that all children should have their voice heard in classroom sensemaking. In this case, Kwin’s use of the term “problem child” was unchallenged. However, later in the conversation, Kwin raised the question of whether the child providing challenging ideas (like the “living sun”) was “a student that’s always trying to cause problems, that’s always trying to get under your skin, or is it a student that is very much [in]quisitive and wants to learn?” This question prompted an exchange in which deficit-based perspectives were recontextualized based on teachers’ lived experiences.

For instance, Facilitator Ashlyn and Christine responded to Kwin’s question of the “problem child” by describing how Jonathan (from the reading) and another African American boy (from Christine’s student teaching observations) were both characterized as problematic, leading, in Christine’s words, to all of their contributions being “always wrong.” Both Ashlyn and Christine tried to imagine the boys’ experiences to consider how this could become alienating, leaving children feeling they have no place in classroom sensemaking or epistemic authority (when, instead, their contributions might have been taken up as generative resources for sensemaking).

This happened again when Facilitator Heather described her own son’s experience. Her son drew on cultural practices in their family (deeply exploring and proposing alternative views) that led him to spend “a lot of time in the hallway” because he was seen as problematic. When Heather described the new school she had found for him where his questioning practices were valued, Kwin suggested that not all children would have the same “opportunity” (to switch to a school that is a better fit) as Heather’s son. In response, Facilitator Ashlyn prompted a perspectival shift, suggesting that classrooms are places of diverse cultural practices, compounded by the diversity in family cultures (e.g., Keifert, 2021), all of which offered resources for learning. In this exchange, facilitators and teachers worked together to reframe a “problem child” as a child who is “very much [in]quisitive and wants to learn” and worthy of positioning with epistemic authority. Each turn of talk that presented a deficit framing was met with a response that was tailored to the specifics of that example, while at the same time encouraging perspective-taking that allowed for more nuanced and contextualized understandings of the situation. The result was incremental and collaborative sensemaking; no one responded as if their ideas were being shut down, but rather the group as a whole explored the intellectual and practical territory of coming to understand “problem” children (and parents) in new ways.

Later, during academic year PD, such transformative stances were apparent in Kwin’s account of her one-on-one interactions with a student. She described a student sharing a non-canonical idea in response to a prompt to draw an example of a living thing—the student drew God. Rather than redirecting the student to choose a different example, Kwin honored her cultural knowledge. Kwin explained in video club, “I know I’m not supposed to do Bible at school, but she brought it up, so I wanted her thought process on it.” The student was classified as an English learner, and to help her share her thinking with pictures, Kwin reached out to her pastor’s wife for support in creating story cards that the student could use to represent her thinking, demonstrating a transformative perspective of equity that honored her students’ ideas and linguistic practices even when they did not align with secular, English-only norms.

This example suggests that facilitators and researchers engaging directly with teachers’ examples (and offering similar examples), rather than countering teachers’ stances at an ideological level only, can support teachers in trying on an equity-as-transformation perspective when reflecting on their experiences. While these conversations did not focus specifically on language, we propose that such conversations were critical for shifting the community’s perspective of non-dominant cultural resources (a broader category that could include linguistic resources). The academic-year episode that follows suggests that conversations like these seeded the ground for teachers to move towards equity-as-transformation in their discourse about multilingual science learners.

Academic year 2: rainbows again—multilingual learners’ sensemaking and tools for all learners

Later during that academic year, teachers in their video clubs engaged with many of these ideas again. This time, teachers from both cohorts drew upon asset-based framings of a multilingual students’ drawing and thinking while observing classroom video of the student and her teacher (Marilyn).

Marilyn (fourth grade) began by introducing the group to what she and her students had been working on, including engaging with a rainbow as an anchoring phenomenon and creating a classroom model on which they had added images, labels, and shared definitions (“instead of just saying transparent, they wrote what that meant”). Marilyn then described the activity in which her students were engaged during the present video clip: she had designed an activity where students observed four different cups (three clear cups with oil, dark soda, and water and a ceramic mug) to make predictions about what would happen to the light on large pieces of paper. As Marilyn described:

So I let them have think time. And then they could draw or the student here wrote and then they were allowed to turn and talk and then we took that and like used it to actually look at the experiment with a different light.

Marilyn described positioning students to draw, write, and talk with one another before their whole class conversation and observation of how the light would interact with the four cups. This approach is one that aligns with equity-as-transformation by privileging multiple forms of sensemaking (i.e., semiotic modes) as valuable for students to take up as they pleased during this work time.

During the video clip, Marilyn talked with a student about their predictions, but because that student’s parents did not consent to their participation, we instead focus on how the teachers in video club understood what was happening. Kourtney (fourth grade) made a connection while watching the video between Marilyn “asking the student to explain her drawing” and the fact that Kourtney found “that helps my students,” in part because:

There’s a lot of times where I’ve misinterpreted students’ drawings. So, you know, asking them to tell me what this represents, not only like, ensures that I’m understanding what they’re thinking, but it gives them a chance to verbalize something that maybe they didn’t think they had the ability to before, but now they have that picture support in.

Here Kourtney emphasized not only the importance of having drawings to support talk about ideas, but the importance of teachers asking students about their drawings to ensure that teachers were able to understand students’ intended meanings. In contrast to the first episode of Rainbows in PD Year 1, here, teachers assumed the drawing itself carried meaning and that through drawings students were not merely “copying” at “step one” but were instead making sense of ideas that were of value. Furthermore, Kourtney positioned herself as a learner in relation to her students with respect to honoring their intended meanings and understanding how students were making sense of science phenomena. Rather than moving to first articulate errors in writing as was done in the first Rainbows episodes with jokes about MLs’ grammatical errors, instead the assumption here was that the meaning was worthy of being understood even if it was not readily apparent to the teacher before engaging with the student.

Next, Facilitator Andrea asked about the lesson sequence, and Marilyn responded by describing that students had a chance to draw pictures, then to turn and talk with other students around them so they “were able to share with their friends and explain it.” Andrea affirmed that design saying, “That’s great. So they got to practice using whatever language they were comfortable with.” Marilyn’s comment again emphasized an open playing field with regard to the semiotic modes of sensemaking, allowing students many modes for sensemaking and expression and valuing each in their own right. This was a significant move towards equity-as-transformation compared with earlier rankings of “Academic English” as most important and drawings as potentially nothing more than “step 1.” Andrea emphasized this shift, valuing multiple modes for sensemaking and allowing students the epistemic authority to choose modes that worked for them in that particular moment.

Just before video club ended, Facilitator Andrea asked about a chart that was visible at the front of the room during the video (whether the chart helped to provide students language). Marilyn described the chart as a collaborative effort, demonstrating another way that students had opportunities to significantly and visibly contribute to the epistemic work of the classroom. Marilyn described students having access to the collaborative chart, individual drawings and writing, and the physical materials used to demonstrate the phenomena in this investigation, as well as how these materials supported students to engage in conversational sensemaking with one another. Marilyn also supported a transformative perspective of language in science by allowing students to add words that mattered to them and their definitions of key ideas. For instance, Marilyn said:

But a lot of them had written definitions for their words. Like they wanted us to say opaque, in the definition, so I let them go up and write, Oh, can we add opaque to our chart then and they would literally write what the word meant. So I thought that was kind of cool.

Marilyn made clear that students were driving the choice of which words they wanted to add to what Andrea then called their “whole group model” (as opposed to “just a chart where [the teacher] wrote, ‘these are all the words I want you to be using’”), describing in detail one particular way students contributed to the epistemic work of understanding light. The continued presence of these shared resources allowed students to direct the epistemic work of their inquiry, creating documentation that they found valuable for themselves.

Marilyn then described how this led to other kinds of discoveries that she had not planned in her lesson sequence. In response to Facilitator Andrea’s comment that the model belonged to the “whole group,” Marilyn added:

It was also interesting, too, because they kind of mentioned how like, even though there was a rainbow in some parts of look like a shadow, and we never really talked about that. So like that was an interesting observation that I hadn’t even noticed. And the colors change with different liquids. So they thought that was cool, too.

In this final comment, Marilyn noted that students were identifying aspects of the phenomenon that she had not planned to attend to. Specifically, she named that students noticed there were parts of the rainbow that looked like a shadow and they hadn’t previously “really talked about that” and named it as “an interesting observation that I hadn’t even noticed.” Marilyn here identified how students were attending to aspects of the phenomena unplanned by her but nonetheless worthy of attending to. Rather than dismiss this phenomenon as not central to her planned line of inquiry, she honored it and recognized that her students were contributing to her own new noticing. She therefore positioned her students’ contributions as positive and valuable even when they weren’t predicted in her lesson plan.

This final episode stands in contrast to those episodes presented above in several ways. First, both cohorts of teachers (Kourtney cohort 1; Marilyn, Christine cohort 2) took up ideas presented in the revised Language Storybook, Jonathan and the Sun, and debrief activities that emphasized multiple semiotic modes that could support students to make sense of key ideas (e.g., talk, drawing, charts, definitions) in non-canonical and transformative ways. This openness towards multiple modes of sensemaking supported these teachers to see the strength in students’ drawing and other semiotic modes during analysis of video in academic year PD. Second, teachers took the position of learners, honoring their students’ sensemaking as worthy of understanding and acknowledging that their own inability to understand students’ drawings or writing may not indicate a lack of value in that work. This move to position teachers as learning from their students’ sensemaking is a distinct move towards equity-as-transformation, recognizing that students’ epistemic contributions and active sensemaking can and should shape teachers’ own sensemaking and the ongoing work of the classroom. Finally, Andrea as the facilitator attended closely to the details of what teachers were sharing, providing feedback grounded in those same contexts to reify bigger ideas about equity-as-transformation through specific feedback (e.g., “That’s great. So they got to practice using whatever language they were comfortable with” and creating a “whole group model” as opposed to “just a chart where [the teacher] wrote, ‘these are all the words I want you to be using’”). The final revision of the PD design implemented in the second workshop of Summer PD 2 provided teachers with opportunities to take up an equity-as-transformation lens to reflect on and notice how their own pedagogical decisions made space for students’ ideas and enabled them to recognize their students’ brilliance in new ways.

Discussion

Above, we described shifts in our professional development design intended to support teachers in taking up an equity-as-transformation lens in their planning and reflection conversations. As demonstrated in our analysis of Summer 1 PD and the following academic year sessions, our initial design supported equity-as-access perspectives of language learning in science classrooms. Specifically, while teachers and PD facilitators emphasized including multimodal representations in science teaching and learning, these resources were framed as scaffolds that supported access to normative disciplinary content and academic English. While this framing can support students’ access to culturally dominant perspectives of science, it can also lead to deficit perspectives of minoritized students’ voices and experiences: for example, characterizing multilingual students like Mila as having “no language.”

In response to such conversations in our Year 1 PD, we redesigned our Summer 2 PD to support more transformative perspectives of both language and science through activities like “Language Storybook” and “Jonathan and the Sun.” Here we address findings as they relate to our research question: How did redesigns (in activities and in facilitation) support K-4 teachers in taking up equity-as-transformation perspectives? While our initial implementation introduced transformative perspectives of language and science, it did not adequately support teachers in connecting these experiences to their own planning and teaching, and, as a result, unintentionally reified ideologies about multimodal resources functioning as scaffolds for academic English expressions of science ideas. Later, more explicitly reframing teachers’ experiences with non-dominant resources for science learning (i.e., reframing the “problem child” as bringing valuable ideas and resources to the science classroom), helped the PD community shift toward more expansive and transformative perspectives of what counts as science learning, opening the community up to students’ resources that might not traditionally be framed as “academic” or “scientific.” This shift in perspective was illustrated in the context of a discussion of MLs during academic-year video club that followed Summer 2 PD, in which teachers viewed students’ drawings not as scaffolds, but instead as valuable ways to convey and communicate intended meanings. This equity-as-transformation perspective not only legitimized students’ resources, but also laid a foundation for students taking on additional ownership and epistemic authority in their classrooms—again, contributing to a more expansive perspective of what counts as science learning in these spaces.

Implications

These findings have implications for both research and practice. In terms of research, they demonstrate the importance of using multiple lenses to consider equity in science classrooms. Focusing on “disciplinary” constructs like epistemic authority alone can continue to marginalize or invisibilize the contributions of students from non-dominant backgrounds (i.e., students whose communities have been oppressed by dominant society), including multilingual learners. It is therefore important for researchers to position themselves as learners, constantly interrogating their own designs and seeking opportunities to challenge deficit perspectives that may emerge (Bang et al., 2018; Warren et al., 2020). Multidisciplinary collaboration becomes increasingly important in this sense (NASEM, 2021; Pierson & Grapin, 2021), because researchers focused on one field (e.g., science education) could otherwise overlook parallel challenges and perspectives in other fields (e.g., multilingual education) by presenting teachers only with equity-as-access perspectives.

In terms of practice, these findings underscore the importance of providing teachers with opportunities to explicitly connect new perspectives of equity with day-to-day experiences of classroom teaching. Shifting ideological perspectives is challenging because it is possible to hold conflicting beliefs simultaneously (Louie et al., 2021; Philip, 2011). Our findings emphasize the importance of not only presenting teachers with new perspectives of equity, but unpacking implications at the level of classroom interactions while attending to teachers’ stories about prior experiences. One important feature of the Language Storybook and Jonathan and the Sun activities that supported such work is that both framed non-dominant learners’ resources in an asset-based way (learners’ semiotic resources and ideas were positioned as beneficial for the classroom community), enabling teachers to focus on students’ strengths rather than only on challenges they may experience.

These implications have led us to two conjectures about designing PD that supports perspectives of equity-as-transformation: (1) introducing transformative visions of disciplines through shared grounding experiences (Language Storybook, Jonathan and the Sun) in coordination with power-explicit unpacking conversations, and (2) facilitating teacher sensemaking in ways that are close to teachers’ practices and experiences. Specifically, PD facilitators should plan for multiple, extended conversations with teachers, grounded in tangible classroom examples, framed with explicit attention to ideologies. For example, in the discussion of the Jonathan and the Sun case, Ashlyn and Heather used ideological framing from the case (a tangible example with explicit attention to ideology) in connection with Heather’s family’s experiences to incrementally reframe teachers’ stances toward students like the “problem child” described above. The facilitators’ use of personal experiences modeled how teachers might consider the abstract “problem child” as a full human being with their own strengths and culture, challenging a deficit narrative incrementally without shutting teachers down.

While these conjectures resonate with PD research (that teachers should participate in active, collaborative sensemaking; e.g., Darling-Hammond et al., 2017; Garet et al., 2001), it is important to note that learning does not automatically transfer across domains. For instance, transformative perspectives of science learning do not automatically translate to transformative perspectives of language learning. This finding suggests the importance of iterative, multidisciplinary learning, both for teachers and for PD facilitators (for instance, through DBR design, reflection, and redesign) to understand these multidimensional aspects of equitable learning.

Limitations

Limitations of this work suggest directions for future research. First, it is noteworthy that critical scholars have argued for reorienting our notions of what counts as legitimate disciplinary work to center Indigenous perspectives (Bang et al., 2018) as well as political and ethical-historical approaches to learning (Bang, 2020; Philip & Sengupta, 2021; Vakil, 2018; Vossoughi et al., 2020). While our redesigned PD pushed back on equity-as-access framings, it did not explicitly deal with these political dimensions of learning. Still, our analysis and our plans for future iterations of this project are inspired by this body of scholarship. As the field increasingly shifts to legitimize and value the voices and languages of learners from non-dominant backgrounds, more research is needed to consider how to share and discuss such perspectives explicitly with teachers, whose work is often constrained by oppressive perspectives and ideologies embodied in standards and school policies (e.g., Dickes et al., 2020; Guy-Gaytán et al., 2019; Holdway & Hitchcock, 2018; Pacheco et al., 2019).

Second, this paper is grounded in illustrative examples that offer snapshots of our PD interactions over time. While we can demonstrate shifts in the PD community’s stance toward equity in the context of PD activities, these data do not offer insight about effects on teachers’ practice, and therefore on students’ opportunities for learning. Further research is needed to trace these long-term shifts in PD discourse to implications for teaching through teacher interviews, observations, and student-level data.

Third, this study primarily focuses on equity within two intersecting domains: science learning and multilingual learning. We acknowledge that there are many other domains in which equity is at play that may be overlooked in our professional development, as well as conceptualization of equity (i.e. beyond equity-as-access and equity-as-transformation) including racial equity or an explicit focus on students’ cultural resources. This work and prior work in the field demonstrate the need to have fully integrated perspectives. Further research is needed, in our PD and more broadly, to continue to expand our lenses when supporting equity-as-transformation perspectives that value and legitimize minoritized or invisibilized voices in ways that bring multiple fields of research into relation to comprehensively attend to students’ capabilities.

Conclusions

Focusing explicitly on conceptualizations of equity in PD (e.g., equity-as-access and equity-as-transformation) has the potential to help researchers and teachers interrogate their own image of equity and implications for their practice and their students. We propose that it is the responsibility of researchers and PD facilitators to consistently seek and offer not only conceptualizations of equity-as-access, but also of equity-as-transformation, in order to design equitable science learning opportunities for students from non-dominant backgrounds. The case study presented in this paper can inform the design of PD programs that support equitable science teaching and learning. However, to realize this potential, further research is needed to: (1) help researchers recognize opportunities for growth, (2) connect new perspectives of equity to teachers’ experiences, and (3) address tensions that arise from standards that prioritize dominant knowledge systems, all while (4) maintaining safe and supportive learning communities for participating teachers.