Science teachers designing text use for equitable Next Generation Science instruction

Abstract

Students need support to learn Next Generation Science practices that include use of such texts as investigative records and datasets, analyses and arguments, and works of other scientists. This article describes secondary school science teachers' curation and support of students' multimodal text use during their development of a library of equitable, text-rich, phenomena-based science units of study. Following a description of project background and inquiry methods, findings delineate how teachers collaborated to select texts, delineate roles for the texts, and use scaffolds to support students' equitable access to these texts in investigations and engineering designing. Findings also explain how the pandemic and teachers' ongoing concerns for their students' equitable learning of science and literacy practices caused teachers to amend their plans. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for science educators and others who are interested in science-specific disciplinary literacies.