In this manuscript, we use the construct of critical epistemologies of place to frame our exploration of how to support engineering design among youth who have historically been marginalized from the domain, and its implications for educational settings. We present an in‐depth longitudinal case study of one 12‐year‐old African American boy to raise questions of what it means for this youth to engage in engineering design in collaboration with the people around in him—experts and knowledgeable others in his community space and how this engagement supports his work in science and engineering. This study suggests that engaging engineering design through a critical epistemology of place involves an iterative and generative process of layering community wisdom and knowledge onto STEM toward (a) how epistemologies of place—and their layers—challenge dominant master narratives, (b) reimagining practices in place, and (c) transforming the dangerous territory of STEM. Our study expands upon current understandings of supporting youth in engaging engineering through highlighting the vital role of sociohistorically constructed understandings of STEM and community in determining when, how, and why engineering takes place.

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This study examines how researchers can better understand the instructional and practical realities of teachers through collective sensemaking. Traditional approaches to curriculum design engage learning models without accounting for the needed flexibility of teachers. This approach has resulted in tension and gatekeeping-inhibiting the implementation of curriculum. Teachers are often considered relatively autonomous; however, this study sheds light on the constrained autonomy teachers experience resulting from internal and external pressures. This study examines the collective sensemaking process of researchers while developing a high school genetics curriculum. By examining the collective sensemaking of the areas of tension that arose during the curriculum design process, the problem space of researchers expanded and became more aligned with the problem space of teachers. Collective sensemaking encouraged the humanizing of teachers by centering their content, contextual, and social needs. In addition, this study suggests that gatekeeping can result from many factors; but through collective sensemaking, researchers can intentionally design to resolve said factors.

For some time, scholars who are guided by critical theories and perspectives have called out how white supremacist ideologies and systemic racism work to (re)produce societal inequities and educational injustices across science learning contexts in the United States. Given the sociopolitical nature of society, schooling, and science education, it is important to address the racist and settled history of scientific disciplines and science education. To this end, we take an antiracist stance on science teaching and learning and seek to disrupt forms of systemic racism in science classrooms. Since teachers do much of the daily work of

While issues of (in)justice in K12 STEM learning have garnered increasing attention, limited research has attended to learning as social-spatial transformation. We draw upon a justice-oriented framework of equitably consequential learning to call attention to how learning and engagement in K12 STEM is rooted in the history and geographies of young people's lives. Without attention to the ways in which learning is an historicized and sociopolitical activity, efforts to address seemingly intractable equity challenges in K12 STEM education across the intersections of racial and class inequality will remain elusive. Using data from middle school classroom studies focused on engineering for sustainable communities, where community ethnography is central to engineering design, we investigate the social-spatial relationalities that minoritized youth bring to engineering design, and how relationalities may support youth in transforming oppressive knowledge and power structures toward equitably consequential learning. Findings reveal that organizing learning engineering design around youths' rich everyday experiences and community wisdom through community ethnography, addressed hyperlocal, sociopolitical community challenges. As a result, the social-spatial terrain upon which subject-object relations are enacted shifted, expanding the discourses, practices and outcomes of middle school engineering design that were legitimized. Making present this power-mediated terrain makes visible the often hidden, but ever present, unjust school-based relationalities, enabling them to be re-mediated in justiceoriented ways. Paying attention to social-spatial relationalities reveal (1) the multiple scales of activity, (2) inter-scalar mobilities and interactions, and (3) possible resultant impacts of such interactions that further affect activity at each scale. We discuss implications for how theories of equitably consequential learning can be advanced through the frame of social-spatial justice.