In this article, we explore the roles of student researchers as they have emerged over 5 years of studies on the teaching and learning of science in urban high schools. These studies incorporate sociocultural theory in an approach to research that explores the capital that urban students bring to school and situates student researchers as active participants who exercise agency by accessing and appropriating a variety of resources. We provide examples of students engaged as productive, central members of a research team and describe the roles in which they have participated, from teacher educators and science learners to curriculum developers and ethnographers. We show how the involvement of students as researchers, within these roles, allows them to produce and select artifacts and data resources for interpretation that offer unique insider perspectives on how to improve the teaching and learning of science for urban high school students. ß 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 42: 2005

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Science educators have yet to identify ways to enable inner city African American high school students to experience success in science. In this paper, we argue that understanding the ways in which cultural practices from fields outside of school mediate what happens inside classrooms and contribute to the learning of students is crucial to addressing current disparities in science performance. Specifically, we explore the significance of movement expressiveness dispositions to the lives and the learning of economically disadvantaged African American youth. These particular dispositions have been repeatedly observed in our research, and they can be important resources for the creation of individual emotional energy, collective solidarity, and heightened engagement in learning activities since they provide resources for the (re)shaping of identity. Thus movement expressiveness dispositions hold potential for transforming the teaching and learning of these students. Stop that tappingOne fall day in 2001, following our first summer of collaborative research, I called Shakeem, one of our student researchers, to see how tenth grade was going. He was not doing well-in fact, he was getting ''kicked out'' of classes often. As I engaged him in a conversation about what was going wrong, he gave

Even during an era of cultural globalization where diversity, hybridity, and heterogeneity prevail, educational institutions remain unchanged and economically and racially marginalized students continue to experience a sense of exclusion in school. Whereas the science education community often addresses such exclusion in terms of the achievement gap or the lack of materials and qualified teachers in urban schools, there are also more subtle ways in which these students remain as outsiders to the culture of science. The study highlights how the acceptance and affordance of students' cultural capital can encourage a sense of belonging with school science. Specifically, this paper contributes to the literature by sharing longitudinal findings that reveal students' skills of orality, in the form of rap practices, can be rich resources for developing creolized forms of school science, and how rap creates entryways for students to form and reform hybridized identities in which canonical science discourse and lyrics about non-science subjects can begin to emerge in integrated, fluid and seamless manners.