Although there is significant evidence that sense-making through discourse is an essential part of learning, student talk typically makes up a small percentage of classroom time. Further, scholars are calling for the need to re-imagine classrooms for science discourse, away from ‘school science’ to hybrid spaces where students’ experiential ways of knowing, home languages, and cultural practices are viewed as resources for advancing their understanding of science phenomena (Emdin, 2011;  Gutiérrez et al., 1999; Rosebery et al., 2016).

This project is working towards this vision for equitable science discourse. Middle school science teachers serving in urban classrooms attend summer professional development and work in same grade lesson study teams throughout the academic year to plan a lesson around a science talk goal, observe one another’s classrooms, and reflect on how their students’ funds of knowledge serve as assets in science discourse activities (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2009; Lewis et al., 2006; Moje et al. 2004). This project is based on the premise that when we center students and the contexts that are relevant to them, student engagement in science talk, and ultimately deeper understanding of science ideas and practices will be achieved.

Secondary students often associate their experiences in STEM disciplines, especially in mathematics, with negative emotions (e.g., dull and boring). Recently the Common Core State Standards of Mathematical Practice, such as making sense of problems and persevere in solving them, challenge teachers to design lessons that encourage students to persevere as they engage with complex mathematical concepts. To address this challenge, the MCLE Project draws on the affordances of narratives to explore how high school mathematics teachers can design mathematical stories, which interprets the unfolding mathematical ideas across a lesson as a narrative. To show how the mathematical content unfolds in a sequence of activities within their mathematical stories, the teachers created representations of the mathematical plots, such as storyboards. Each of the six participating teachers designed and enacted three MCLEs to offer different types of aesthetic experiences, such as surprise or wonder. The lesson topics for each MCLE were selected by the teachers so that it can fit within the curriculum of their courses. Using post-lesson surveys and selected student interviews, the student aesthetic experiences with MCLEs were compared with their experiences in lessons that were not designed using the mathematical story framework.