School science continues to alienate students identifying with nondominant, non‐western cultures, and learners of color, and considers science as an enterprise where success necessitates divorcing the self and corporeal body from ideas and the mind. Resisting the colonizing pedagogy of the mind–body divide, we aimed at creating pedagogical spaces and places in science classes that sustain equitable opportunities for engagement and meaning making where body and mind are enmeshed. In the context of a partnership between school‐ and university‐based educators and researchers, we explored how multimodal literacies cultivated through the performing arts, provide students from minoritized communities opportunities to both create knowledge and to position themselves as science experts and brilliant and creative meaning makers. Four theoretical perspectives (social semiotics and multimodality; dramatizing and the embodied mind; dismantling master narratives for minoritized peoples; and the relationship of knowledge production and identity construction) framed this multiple case study of classes of elementary and middle school students who made sense of and communicated science concepts and practices through embodied performances. The study provided evidence that embodied science representations afford students abundant opportunities to construct science knowledge and positionings that support engagement with science, whether performed on a small scale in classrooms, or for the whole school through a large‐scale science play. Embodied dramatizing led to opportunities for collective meaning making as student‐performers coordinated across various movements and modes in order to represent ideas. Multiple enactments of the same concept nurtured the development of multi‐dimensional scientific, sociocultural, and sociopolitical meanings. During embodiments, students positioned themselves and others in ways that allowed expanded science identities to become possible, intertwined with other salient identities. By treating children's bodies as sites of knowledge, imagination, and expertise, integrating performing arts and science has the potential to facilitate the development of connections among ideas and between self and ideas.

The authors describe themes of cultural persistence, political resistance, and hope in the art of one Puerto Rican neighborhood in the Midwestern United States. The themes are described across three contexts: community mural art, poetry from students in an alternative high school, and poetry from seventh grade students in a neighborhood middle school. In describing currents of Puerto Rican identity-making, resistance to gentrification, and struggles against local oppression that are evident in all three contexts, the authors argue that as they name their worlds, students commit acts of social justice through their perpetuation of historical and cultural themes situated within a tradition of community activism.We are all historical beings, our personhoods shaped by the seemingly fossilized institutions through which we move. We are also all agents of our own making, our histories mediated by the ways in which we creatively participate in and change the world. Yet school can treat students as ahistorical, and students can treat school as disassociated from the rest of their lives. To treat students as historical beings, schools must become permeable. They must allow the practices, tensions, and struggles of students' lives to become a part of the subject of study. In this article, we describe how arts-based permeable pedagogical practices allow for urban young people to place their own historically and locally situated personhoods at the center of study. We further highlight how art, in neighborhood settings and two schools, addresses the historical roots of conflict in the students' neighborhood as cruces of learning.The neighborhood to which we refer, Park Town, 1 is commonly identified as a geographically bounded and ethnically Puerto Rican neighborhood in a Midwestern city in the United States.

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This article uses a critical sociohistorical lens to discuss and explain examples of the ways in which young people reflect, refract, and contribute to discourses of gentrification, displacement, and racial, ethnic, and geographic community identity building in a rapidly changing urban neighborhood. The article explores examples from open-ended dialogic conversations in one seventh-grade classroom. In their conversations, youth imagine themselves and their communities as sociohistorically yet dynamically situated. We argue that such spaces allow for schools and students to bridge in and out of school worlds, amplifying young people's relationships to enduring struggles in changing urban contexts.