Practical guidance for teachers aiming to strategically support the full participation and engagement of minoritized students in STEM education. In Teaching Toward Rightful Presence in Middle School STEM, Edna Tan and Angela Calabrese Barton introduce the rightful presence framework, a multifaceted approach to instruction that enables historically marginalized students to gain agency in their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning. This necessary work presents practical, justice-centered STEM pedagogy that can begin to reverse the messages of exclusion that have pervaded K–12 science education. Tan and Calabrese Barton first delve into the complex legacy of systemic injustice in education, showing how forms of racialization and colonization that are manifest in schooling practices have excluded and led to the disengagement of students who have been historically marginalized because of their race, immigration status, language, class, sexuality, or gender. Through cases and vignettes from middle-school classrooms, they illustrate real-life strategies and instructional decisions that help counteract inequalities. Reaching beyond inclusion, they suggest approaches such as coplanning, coproduction, and community ethnography that disrupt the norms of the science classroom and validate the community's powerful cultural knowledge and relevant experience. Tan and Calabrese Barton show how the rightful presence framework can foster student engagement and support identity formation. This work gives teachers and other practitioners a means to critique, challenge, and disrupt underlying power structures in middle school STEM.

Math and science hold powerful places in contemporary society, setting the foundations for entry into some of the most robust and highest-paying industries. However, effective math and science education is not equally available to all students, with some of the poorest students - those who would benefit most - going egregiously underserved. This ongoing problem with education highlights one of the core causes of the widening class gap. While this educational inequality can be attributed to a number of economic and political causes, in "Empowering Science and Mathematics Education in Urban Communities", Edna Tan and Angela Calabrese Barton demonstrate that it is augmented by a consistent failure to integrate student history, culture, and social needs into the core curriculum. They argue that teachers and schools should create hybrid third spaces - neither classroom nor home - in which underserved students can merge their personal worlds with those of math and science. A host of examples buttress this argument: schools where these spaces have been instituted now provide students not only an immediate motivation to engage the subjects most critical to their future livelihoods but also the broader math and science literacy necessary for robust societal engagement. A unique look at a frustratingly understudied subject, "Empowering Science and Mathematics Education" pushes beyond the idea of teaching for social justice and into larger questions of how and why students participate in math and science.

Democratic science pedagogy has the potential to shape learning outcomes and science engagement by taking on directly issues of pedagogy, learning, and social justice. In this text we provide a framework for democratic science teaching in order to interrogate the purposes and goals of science education in classrooms globally, as well as to call attention to ways of being in the classroom that position teachers and students as important and powerful participants in their own learning and as change-agents of a larger global society. We develop three core conceptual tools for democratic science teaching, that together frame ways of thinking and being in classrooms that work towards a more just world: Voice, Authority, and Critical Science Literacy. Each conceptual tool is developed in the introductory chapters then taken up in different pedagogical and analytic ways in the chapters that span the text. The chapters present researcher, teacher, and student centered lenses for investigating democratic science education and reflect elementary through high school education, both in school and out of school, in the US and globally.