Becoming a social justice teacher, for high-poverty urban settings, is fraught with emotional ambivalence related to personal, professional, relational, political, and cultural social justice issues. Prospective teachers must navigate their sense of justice, grapple with issues of educational disparity, engage with theories of critical, multicultural, and constructivist approaches to teaching science, and articulate their vision and philosophy of teaching. Furthermore, their emotional navigation occurs at nested micro, meso, and macro levels. In this article, I present a case study of the historical development of an African-American, Caribbean preservice teacher's social justice stance. Drawing on the concepts of emotional genealogy, critical emotional praxis, and positional identity, I explore why she majored in Chemistry, how she decided to become a Chemistry teacher, and her struggles with notions of oppression and multicultural education. The narratives focus on what emotions Nicole expresses, and how those emotions help Nicole position herself with respect to social justice issues she navigates, from micro to macro levels, in becoming a social justice Chemistry teacher. #

This study describes the resources and strategies middle school teachers, urban fellows, and a district science staff developer coactivated to resist the marginalization of science in a high‐poverty, low‐performing urban school. Through critical narrative inquiry, I document factors that marginalized science in three teachers' classrooms. The narratives show that constraints related to cultural, material, and social resources contributed to a more global symbolic resource constraint, the low status and priority of science in the school. The narratives develop a new category of strategic resources embodied or controlled by others and leveraged to improve students' opportunities to learn science. Attention to a broader array of resources, including social, symbolic, and strategic resources, helps to excavate some of the inertial forces that might derail efforts to teach for social justice. The findings provide a sense of how and why teachers might activate resources to resist the marginalization of science in their classrooms. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47:840–860, 2010

One of the central challenges globalization and immigration present to education is how to construct school language policies, procedures, and curricula to support academic success of immigrant youth. This case-study compares and contrasts language experience narratives along Elena's developmental trajectory of becoming an urban science teacher. Elena reflects upon her early language experiences and her more recent experiences as a preservice science teacher in elementary dual language classrooms. The findings from Elena's early schooling experiences provide an analysis of the linkages between Elena's developing English proficiency, her Spanish proficiency, and her autobiographical reasoning. Elena's experiences as a preservice teacher in two elementary dual language classrooms indicates ways in which those experiences helped to reframe her views about the intersections between language learning and science learning. I propose the language experience narrative, as a subset of the life story, as a way to understand how preservice teachers reconstruct past language experiences, connect to the present, and anticipate future language practices.Keywords Language experience narrative Á Life story Á Emotions Á English language learners Á Dual language model Becoming an urban science teacherAt the time of this study, Elena was a neuroscience major enrolled in an undergraduate education program with the goal of becoming a middle school science teacher. Elena emigrated from the Dominican Republic at the age of five, attended New York City public schools from kindergarten through eighth grade and a small private high school before enrolling at the university. She is currently a fourth-year, middle school, mathematics and science teacher in a New York City public school. To become a teacher Elena had to