In science education, students need to work with laboratory elements that create conditions for them to learn to do science and experience the value of making meaning in this process. However, students rarely get to carry out investigations that resemble actual scientific practices. More often, they are encouraged to follow an already given knowledge structure, rather than allowed to shape it by themselves. In this study, we investigate how students' meaning-making processes develop when they work with an open inquiry with three degrees of freedom aimed at really doing science. Meaning-making in doing science involves both the typical science-content dimension and a sometimes more overlooked aesthetic dimension. Thus, to gain insight into the students' meaning-making in this, we rendered a thick description of the students' experience, including an analysis of the aesthetic dimension. We compared the processes of two student groups in year 9 and how, within their groups, they collectively made meaning of an open inquiry. The results showed how the processes took quite different turns, moving through peaks and troughs in each group. The first group began with resignation and ended up with a strong commitment towards the openness of the task. For the other group, the journey was quite the opposite. They began engaged, with a lot of ideas about a phenomenon that turned out to be impossible to create. This study shows that in this open process, the materials available and the teacher’s guidance are crucial for supporting the students’ meaning-making. This study therefore becomes an important contribution to a discussion about what is needed to help students make meaning in doing.

Instructional practices in science education often create dichotomies of “expert” and “outsider” that produce distinct power differences in classrooms. Building upon the idea of “making present practice” to disrupt these binaries, this paper presents select findings from a year-long study investigating two urban teachers' use of community-based science (CBS) instructional practices to create relational shifts that reframe expert and expertise in science instruction. By examining how CBS instructional practices reframe power through co-learning experiences, our findings demonstrated that teachers positioned youth as knowledge constructors through three instructional practices: (a) creating space for students to share their knowledge and experiences, (b) positioning students’ lives and experiences as assets to/within science, and (c) being responsive to assets in future lessons. We use these findings to demonstrate how CBS instructional practices support shifts in relational dynamics by creating spaces of rightful presence, where students are viewed as legitimate classroom members who contribute scientific knowledge in practice and have power in the classroom space. By relinquishing traditional boundaries in science teaching to deconstruct ideas of who holds power, we position CBS instructional practices as a means to expand educational equity by legitimizing students’ diverse sensemaking and re-mediating hierarchical structures in classroom spaces.

The aim of this work is to reflect on the challenging trajectory of international cooperation between East Timor and Brazil, which focused on the need to rethink teacher education from a critical intercultural perspective, aiming to build emancipatory relations, love, and solidarity. From 2009 until 2016, we coordinated the Qualification of Teachers and Teaching of the Portuguese Language program in East Timor, inspired by the dialogicity of Paulo Freire, an educator well known and beloved by the Timorese people for his indirect contribution to the independence of that country. Freire's dialectic denunciation-annunciation was essential to identify the problems and propose solutions with the Timorese and not only for them. In addition, through our experiences in that country, we identified issues like those of Brazilian education as the effects of coloniality and introjections of inferiority and subordination, as well as the transnationalization of education, among other problems. Thus, the Freirean dialectic denunciation-announcement of this praxis, together with Timorese education, drove us to examine our own Brazilian territory, provoking intersectional reflections related to racism, gender and sexuality issues, and social class prejudice, among other forms of oppression. It deepened ways of acting based on critical interculturality and the concept of decolonial pedagogy, which suggested ways to fight for social justice in science education.