Writing serves varied and important purposes in science education. Wellington and Osborne have called writing “fundamental to any meaningful notion of scientific literacy” (2001 p. 64). Writing activities can be used for formative and summative assessment, for teaching students to write scientific texts (“learning to write science”), and for supporting student understanding (“writing to learn science”). Writing to learn can include learning content knowledge or complex patterns of scientific thinking (Keys 1999). However, many science teachers devote relatively little time to student writing, and writing to learn is particularly rare. In a recent national survey, over 50% of high school science teachers reported assigning writing-to-learn activities either never or only a few times per year (Drew, Olinghouse, Faggella-Luby and Welsh 2017). In spite of this infrequency, though, research on writing to learn in science has blossomed in recent decades.

The growth of writing to learn has increased attention to the roles of purpose and audience in student science writing. Much of this research has documented especial benefits when students write about science for “authentic purposes and audiences”—concepts defined in several different ways, but usually understood to include purposes that go beyond those of traditional classroom activities and audiences beyond one’s own classroom (e.g., writing for much older or much younger peers, rather than writing texts which will only be read by a teacher). Writing activities with audiences beyond the class can positively impact outcomes such as students’ understanding of scientific concepts or their overall interest in science, as seen in the work of Ying-Chih Chen, Brian Hand, and Leah McDowell (2013); Murat Gunel, Brian Hand, and Vaughan Prain (2007); Gunel, Hand, and Mark McDermott (2009); and Uwe Simon, Hanna Steindl, Nicole Larcher, Helga Kulac, and Annelies Hotter (2016). Importantly, some of these activities have been shown to differentially benefit students with identities that have historically been marginalized in science (Chen, Hand and McDowell 2013).

Writing activities that can reduce inequality are especially important because science education in the USA produces highly inequitable outcomes. Persons racialized and gendered as White men comprise 31% of the USA population but 49% of the STEM workforce; in comparison, persons racialized and gendered as Hispanic or Latina women comprise 8% of the U.S. population but only 2% of the STEM workforce (NCSES 2017). Similar patterns are apparent among many other racialized and gendered groups of U.S. denizens. There are many elements of systemic racism and economic inequality which likely contribute to these patterns, including residential segregation, pervasive racial and ethnic stereotypes that negatively impact marginalized students’ sense of belonging in science (Fort and Varney 1989), and inequitable distribution of school curricula and resources (Oakes 1990). In order to support all students in developing scientific literacy, we must purposefully design and implement practices that can advance equity (and disrupt inequities) in schools. In theory, science writing for authentic purposes and audiences could help to advance equity. To advance equity in this way, however, we must answer a crucial question: which purpose(s) and whose purposes count as authentic in classroom science writing?

Does authenticity depend on how a student science writing task compares to writing tasks that professional scientists do outside the classroom? Does it depend on how the task compares to writing done by non-scientists in general, or by adults who feature prominently in students’ lives? Does authenticity not depend on the task at all, but rather on students’ subjective experiences or motivations? Is whose purposes a better question than which purposes? Critically interrogating and theorizing the notion of authenticity will have important implications for building upon previous research and could have practical implications for teachers, for designers of writing-based curriculum and interventions, and for researchers interested in the cognitive and sociocultural dimensions of writing pedagogy.

In this theoretical manuscript, we examine the notion of authenticity in science writing using the framework of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP). CRP is a framework for disrupting educational inequities and creating a learning environment that supports students’ individual and collective empowerment (Ladson-Billings 1995b). The CRP framework posits that education should be organized to advance three goals: First, helping students achieve academic success; second, helping them maintain valued forms of cultural or linguistic competence while also developing new forms of competence (Paris 2012); third, helping them develop both the ability and the inclination to think critically about sociopolitical issues, reaching a state of critical consciousness (Ladson-Billings 1995a). CRP has been applied extensively in science education, particularly over the past decade; see for example the work of Felicia Mensah (2011), Judson Laughter and Amelia Adams (2012), and Tia Madkins and Maxine McKinney de Royston (2019).

Recently, science educators have called for the integration of CRP into frameworks for the teaching of scientific literacy (Yerrick and Ridgeway 2017) and specifically for the teaching of science writing (Seraphin 2014). Doing so successfully might involve using science writing as a mechanism for helping students learn scientific methods and ideas, maintain and expand their cultural and linguistic competence(s), and think critically about sociopolitical issues and how they relate to science. In this theoretical manuscript, we will argue that CRP provides a useful framework for understanding and operationalizing the concept of “authenticity” in student science writing.

Writing to learn

Writing can promote different types of learning outcomes in different ways, some better understood than others. For example, writing may provide opportunities for self-explanation (Pi, Zhang, Shi, Guo and Yang 2021); prompt writers to identify and solve content-knowledge problems in order to achieve rhetorical goals (Scardamalia and Bereiter 1987); or enable students to “clarif[y] their own ideas about science topics” (Rivard 1994 p. 971) and “to personalize knowledge” (p. 973) and thereby construct more accurate or detailed understandings. Learning from writing activities has been documented by many recent studies and reviews; see for example Chen, Hand and McDowell (2013) and Gunel, Hand and McDermott (2009). In other words, while teachers often conceptualize and utilize writing as a tool for students to tell what they know, writing can also transform what students know, and teachers can learn how to promote this type of knowledge transformation in their classes. Prain and Hand (1996) proposed a model for specifying the demands of writing tasks in order to facilitate this type of writing-to-learn. Furthermore, writing to learn could also include learning particular types of scientific reasoning processes, such as argumentation–see for example the work of Fatma Yaman (2018). Finally, certain writing activities may help student writers build their identities in ways that can lead to generative thinking (Ball 2009). In science, this might involve student writers developing the disposition to be critical and to use science for advocacy and social action, goals advanced by Derek Hodson (2003). Gaell Hildebrand (1998) offers suggestions for types of writing activities that may further similar goals.

As mentioned above, a growing body of research suggests that many of these benefits may be especially likely to accrue when students write about science for authentic audiences and purposes, usually understood to include purposes that go beyond those of traditional classroom activities and audiences beyond one’s own classroom (e.g., writing letters to much older or much younger peers). Writing for non-teacher audiences appears to improve outcomes such as students’ understanding of scientific concepts (Gunel, Hand and McDermott 2009) or interest in science (Simon, Steindl, Larcher, Kulac and Hotter 2016), and some of these activities appear to differentially benefit students with identities that have historically been marginalized in science as well as low-achieving students (Chen, Hand and McDowell 2013).

However, research suggests that writing for audiences beyond the classroom remains rare. Historically, the science teacher has been among the most common audiences for K-12 student science writing (Applebee, Lehr and Auten 1980). Of course, teachers are likely to be an audience of most student writing, because teachers use student writing to formatively and summatively assess students and (hopefully) provide them with useful feedback. However, the studies cited above suggest that science writing is often even more teacher-centric than writing in language arts or social studies classes. Sally Drew, Natalie Olinghouse, Michael Faggella-Luby, and Megan Welsh (2017) found that some U.S. science teachers do ask their students to “communicate observations, findings, and theories to potential audiences beyond the teacher” (p. 10), but teachers were not explicitly asked to quantify the various audiences of their students’ writing, and the types of writing most likely to have explicit audiences beyond the classroom (e.g., letters, research papers, and digital texts) were also among the least used. Meanwhile, other research suggests that less than one in six U.S. science teachers “frequently” ask their students to read each others’ writing (Applebee and Langer 2011). In 2018, one of us conducted an unpublished survey of high school biology teachers enrolled in a professional development focused on scientific literacy and found that most respondents said they “never or almost never” had students write for younger peers (74%), parents or guardians (77%), or other adults outside the classroom (70%) (Sedlacek 2019).

To us, this pattern is worrying. When teachers are almost always the primary or sole audience of student science writing, this strongly implies that it is teachers’ purposes, rather than students’ purposes, that tend to drive such writing. We do not argue that writing for one’s teacher is bad or that writing for non-teacher audiences is automatically or inherently good. However, there is mounting evidence that writing for non-teacher audiences can sometimes lead to improved and perhaps more equitable student learning; see for example Gunel, Hand and McDermott (2009) and Chen, Hand and McDowell (2013).

We recognize that many science teachers do important work to center students’ purposes, and often succeed. Some science teachers give students valuable opportunities to make important decisions about their writing—e.g., by choosing the topic of a research paper, or by reporting on outcomes of a project they designed themselves or have a strong interest in pursuing; see for example the student presentations described by Daniel Morales-Doyle (2017). Many students may become deeply invested in these writing tasks and may come to recognize their own purposes for such tasks, purposes like learning about a topic that interests me or finding an answer to a problem in my life or my community. However, as long as the teacher is the only living, breathing audience for the vast majority of science writing tasks, we argue that students likely feel constraints on the purposes and audiences of their writing. Instead, we fear that many students either do not see a meaningful purpose for science writing at all, or see primarily school-bound, inauthentic purposes (e.g., to get a grade, to satisfy my teacher, to show the teacher what I know, etc.). We argue that the notion of “authentic purposes” needs to be explored further, and that this exercise has important implications for classroom practice. What do we mean by authentic purposes, and how does (or how should) this meaning shape instruction?

Authentic purposes are scientists’ purposes

One answer to this question might be that we want students to write for the same purposes that professional scientists write: to satisfy curiosity, solve problems, add to knowledge, and communicate ideas to others interested in reading them. (Of course, professional scientists also have other more specific rationales for writing, e.g., to solicit grant funding, to pursue tenure, and to advocate for policies or practices informed by research). Carolyn Keys (1999) associates authentic purposes for writing with scientific inquiry, pointing out that according to constructivist models of science instruction,

Students involved in investigative activities have authentic purposes for writing that might include keeping track of procedures and data, reflecting on the quality of designs, brainstorming new ideas, making meaning of results, and communicating what they have found to others (p. 120).

Similar notions of authentic purpose appear throughout the science writing literature. For instance, Drew, Olinghouse, Faggella-Luby and Welsh (2017) advocate for “asking students to write lengthier compositions for audiences and purposes authentic to the discipline of science…to build and extend knowledge within a scientific learning community” (p. 18; emphasis added). They refer to the work of Maria Chuy, Marlene Scardamalia, Carl Bereiter, Fleur Prinsen, Monica Resendes, Richard Messina, Winifred Hunsburger, Chris Teplovs and Angela Chow (2010) as well as Bereiter and Scardamalia (2010), who suggest that authentic tasks in science classrooms involve children building new, productive knowledge. Bereiter and Scardamalia state that such knowledge.

Has to have value to people other than yourself, its value must endure for some time beyond the moment, it must have application beyond the situation that gave rise to it, and it must display some modicum of creativity (however that is judged) (2010, p. 3).

According to this definition, children are capable of producing small but original contributions to knowledge, akin to those generated in a doctoral dissertation or the everyday work of a commercial research enterprise.

We might say, then, that this conception of authenticity reflects a conception of science as solving problems and generating new insights. When children solve problems and generate new insights, this experience is authentically science, and they are thus fulfilling authentic purposes. These authentic purposes for science writing necessarily go hand-in-hand with authentic audiences because of the nature of productive knowledge itself: it must “have value to people other than yourself” and this “value must endure for some time beyond the moment” (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 2010, p. 3), creating an impetus for conveying this new knowledge to an external audience in an enduring format (i.e., writing).

We agree that this model and the practices embedded within it are valuable–indeed, essential. We have personally worked to promote this type of authentic knowledge creation elsewhere in our work (Oehlman, Haeger, Sedlacek and Amador 2022). At the same time, we recognize that the purposes of classroom-based knowledge creation are almost invariably twofold: instructors who facilitate student knowledge creation always have pedagogical goals (e.g., students learn certain content, skills, or–more rarely–certain dispositions) as well as knowledge creation goals (e.g., students answer an original research question) (Cooper, Soneral and Brownell 2017). The same is true of K-12 science writing; teachers’ underlying pedagogical purposes for using authentic writing tasks are typically centered on promoting students’ learning of science content, scientific discourses, or writing skills. We suspect that many science teachers see knowledge creation as a valuable exercise because it facilitates student learning along conventional metrics, more so than because knowledge creation matters in and of itself. We do not raise this point to critique it; rather, we mention it in order to show that the pedagogical purposes for using authentic tasks are often separate and distinct from the purposes that make these tasks authentic.

Authentic purposes are “real world” purposes that exist outside of school contexts

Some scholars define a writing task as authentic if it has a form and function similar to the forms and functions of writing tasks that exist outside of schools. Nell Duke, Victoria Purcell-Gates, Leigh Hall, and Cathy Tower (2006) argue for this view and suggest that the authenticity of a science writing (or reading) task falls along a two-dimensional continuum of purpose and form. First, they argue that authentic writing tasks are those that serve “a true communicative purpose” (p. 346), such as communicating a student’s ideas to a less knowledgeable audience (as often happens outside school). In this case, completing a worksheet or writing an essay read only by one’s teacher would be highly inauthentic, except perhaps in special cases where the teacher has little prior knowledge about the essay topic and the student is aware of this imbalance in advance. A more authentic purpose might be served, Duke and colleagues argue, by students writing to teach and excite younger peers before a field trip to a nature center, or to report the results of an original research project to parents or community members.

Second, Duke and colleagues argue that form shapes authenticity. In their view, authentic writing tasks resemble “texts that are used by readers and writers outside of a learning-to-read-or-write context” (p. 346); thus, textbook passages are relatively inauthentic, whereas a newspaper article or journal article would be relatively authentic. In their other work, these authors have demonstrated that tasks which meet this definition of authenticity tend to promote growth in elementary students’ science reading comprehension and science writing skills (Purcell-Gates, Duke and Martineau 2007).

Building on Duke and colleagues’ model, Katalin Wargo (2020) argues that the authenticity of writing tasks can be conceptualized on a spectrum from latent authenticity–in which texts mimic the form of those that are written outside of school for a variety of purposes, but which have an audience of only the teacher–to functional authenticity, in which texts mimic those written outside of school and are actually used to advance the same goals as outside-of-school texts. The latter tends to require a real, non-teacher audience; for instance, students might write a letter to a newspaper editor and give this letter to their teacher to provide feedback, or they might write a letter to a newspaper editor that is actually sent to a newspaper editor.

In these examples, “authentic purposes for writing” might be defined as “purposes that motivate anyone–scientists or non-scientists alike–to write outside of a school setting, and which are therefore also likely to motivate students to write inside a school setting.” We find this definition, too, to be highly compelling, and to reflect the sorts of writing tasks we try to support K-12 teachers in implementing.

As with the “knowledge creation” definition of authenticity, however, we suspect that many science teachers see authentic purposes as valuable from a relatively utilitarian standpoint. Duke, Purcell-Gates, Hall and Tower (2006) observed that many teachers define authenticity somewhat vaguely, making reference to activities that are “relevant,” “fun,” “interesting,” or “motivating” for students (p. 345). We suspect that some teachers value “authentic purposes'' for student science writing as a means to an end–that is, teachers may value tasks with authentic purposes insofar as these contribute to student achievement on conventional outcome metrics, more so than because writing for authentic purposes matters in and of itself. This leads us to yet another definition of authenticity, one centered around the effects that writing tasks have on students rather than the properties of the tasks themselves.

Authentic purposes are purposes that motivate students

Some science education researchers have innovatively combined these bodies of research for authentic purposes. Vicki McQuitty, Sharon Dotger and Uzma Khan (2010) propose an instructional model that integrates the teaching of science and the teaching of writing, making a compelling argument that “authentic science writing cannot occur apart from the enterprise of doing science…[and] authentic scientific inquiry cannot occur without writing as a part of the process.” In doing so, they consider several types of purposes, including the “purposes of both disciplines” (p. 316) as well as the social purposes that motivate students’ deep engagement in the writing process. Purposes of science instruction, furthered through writing, include such goals as “learning science concepts” and “providing entry into the scientific community, its ways of thinking, and the discourses it uses” (p. 321), while, purposes of writing instruction include such goals as learning to “communicate effectively with a variety of audiences for a variety of purposes” (p. 322). Meanwhile, authentic purposes are implicitly defined in relation to the role they play in motivating students:

Writing about meaningful content for authentic purposes and audiences provides motivation for children to revise their drafts (Calkins 1994). Revision potentially serves several important purposes in the writing/science process. First, it creates another writing-to-learn opportunity because revisiting the original text allows students to reexamine and clarify the science concepts they included. In addition, children may learn revision strategies, how to communicate more effectively with their audience, and how to advance their texts toward their rhetorical goals (McQuitty, Dotger and Khan 2010 p. 323).

Dotger and colleagues’ invaluable work makes explicit the dynamic we have noted above in other texts on authentic purpose. That is, authentic purposes are purposes that motivate students to engage in writing activities, activities that can in turn advance teachers’ pedagogical purposes. Some of these pedagogical purposes of writing are distinct from the “authentic purposes” that might motivate students, but others overlap (e.g., teachers’ goal of helping students advance their own rhetorical goals).

Reflecting on these models of authenticity has led us to wonder: are there situations in which teachers’ pedagogical purposes for writing and purposes that motivate students to write are one and the same? And if so, what instructional practices are likely to create such situations?

For example, students’ and teachers’ purposes might overlap in situations where students are engaged in deliberate efforts to build their own knowledge and skills in pursuit of a better world for themselves and the people they care about. Such situations probably do not arise by accident, at least not in most classrooms; instead, teachers must intentionally cultivate these situations. We refer to cultivating situations because teachers cannot simply bestow the purpose of “building a better world for yourself” on students, any more than a teacher can bestow “empowerment” on students. Instead, teachers must create conditions where students grow increasingly likely to recognize, choose, and pursue this purpose themselves, using a framework specifically designed to cultivate these outcomes. One such framework is Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) (Ladson-Billings 1995a), which can craft space for a learning ecology (Barron 2006) in which teacher’s pedagogical practices are intentionally aligned with students' purposes. When a science teacher creates such a learning ecology, science learning can help to address and redress racism and can better serve the needs of racially marginalized students. At the same time, we note that CRP is not only intended for use with racially marginalized students. CRP is arguably “good teaching” for all students, but CRP research often focuses on racially marginalized students because systemic racism has prevented many of these students from experiencing such good teaching (Ladson-Billings 1995a).

We are interested in science writing activities that create the conditions for an authentic experience that honors students' funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff and Gonzalez 1992) and already existing cultural wealth (Yosso 2005). What sorts of writing activities leave students more likely to pursue their own interests? What sorts of writing activities lead students to draw connections that are relevant and meaningful to them? To recognize the role of science in (re)producing injustices? To use their growing scientific knowledge and skills to advocate on behalf of themselves or others? We argue that when students engage in such activities, teachers’ pedagogical purposes for writing and students’ authentically felt purposes for writing are essentially the same. However, our challenge is not simply to identify and implement certain types of tasks; informed by Freirean theories of critical pedagogy, we do not believe that “empowerment” can be directly taught to students through predetermined activities or curricula. Instead, we need a framework for designing and implementing writing instruction that creates conditions under which students become increasingly likely to use writing to reshape their world for the better. CRP provides one such framework.

Culturally relevant pedagogy

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) is one popular framework that has been proposed to disrupt educational inequities. Developed by Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995b), CRP builds upon traditions of critical pedagogy in Brazil and elsewhere (Freire 1974) as well as the work of Courtney Cazden and Ellen Leggett (1981) and Geneva Gay (1995) in the USA. However, CRP differs from these prior approaches in key ways. CRP emphasizes student empowerment as a collective, rather than an individual, goal (Ladson-Billings 1995a). Meanwhile, it differs from culturally responsive pedagogy in that it places relatively less emphasis on recommending particular teacher practices and more emphasis on the goals of such practices (Gay 2002). In particular, CRP is defined by Ladson-Billings as pedagogy that advances three goals–supporting students’ academic success, developing their cultural competence, and developing critical consciousness (Ladson-Billings 1995a).

Since CRP is defined by a particular set of goals, it does not rely on a static or predetermined set of practices (Ladson-Billings 2014). Practices associated with CRP have thus varied considerably over the past twenty-five years; however, several common themes are apparent in the literature. A review by Kristan Morrison, Holly Robbins and Dana Rose (2008), summarized in Table 1 below, argues that several main approaches have been implemented to support academic success, sustain and develop cultural competence, and cultivate critical consciousness.

Table 1 Goals of culturally relevant pedagogy and strategies for operationalizing them
Full size table

However, CRP is often misused and misinterpreted. The term “culturally relevant” has become immensely popular in education research; as of this writing, Ladson-Billings’s pivotal 1995 article outlining CRP has been cited more than 8000 times, and a GoogleScholar search for the phrase “culturally relevant” yields more than 180,000 results. Yet this popularity does not mean that CRP is consistently applied or even widely understood. Ladson-Billings herself has pointed out that many instantiations of CRP are unrecognizable distortions of her original framework, focused on superficial and essentializing notions of “culture” rather than purposeful attention to the three goals delineated above (Ladson-Billings 2014). Christine Sleeter (2012) writes about the marginalization of both culturally relevant and culturally responsive pedagogies, arguing that teachers often conceptualize one of both of these pedagogies as: (1) celebration of student cultures without critical analysis or attention to academic success; (2) oversimplification or trivialization of CRP as a set of activities or steps to be followed rather than a comprehensive approach to teaching; (3) incorporating static, stereotypical notions of “culture” into instruction; and (4) substituting cultural analysis for political analysis, in keeping with neoliberal discourses of diversity.

One way to avoid distorting CRP is by centering student choice, agency, and input. There is no compelling reason to believe that most or all students with a specific racialized identity share common interests, cultures, or experiences (except, perhaps, shared experiences of racism and marginalization); thus, policies and practices that support the academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness of one class of students may not necessarily support another class of students, even if students in these classes share a common racialized or ethnic identity. Understanding how to advance these goals for a specific class of students requires getting to know students and designing or modifying one’s instruction in response to student input. It also requires creating conditions where students are likely to share such input, both because they have opportunities to do so and because they feel comfortable doing so.

These ideas have important implications for science writing instruction. They suggest that students’ and teachers’ purposes for science writing are more likely to align when students' interests and input inform teachers’ pedagogical decisions–not merely by allowing students to choose a topic for writing, but also by allowing students to choose or modify other aspects of writing tasks such as genre, format, or audience. They also suggest students are more likely to contribute such input if teachers provide writing opportunities that are flexible and nonlinear (meaning that teachers are open to changing important elements of a writing task in response to student input, including unsolicited input). Teachers must also create environments where students are willing and likely to share their input; this might be achieved by using various strategies that advance cultural competence and critical consciousness, signaling to students with marginalized identities that their ideas, input, and critiques are valued.

A writing approach that is student-centered urges science educators to move away from teacher-curated lists of writing topics and move towards allowing students to develop their own scientific inquiries and lead. In addition, this approach creates an opportunity for a paradigm shift in which instruction is now responsive to student ideas and interests; teachers respond to and sustain such interests through their instructional choices for content design and writing. For example, Jean Aguilar-Valdez, Carlos López Leiva, Deborah Roberts-Harris, Diane Torres-Velásquez, Gilberto Lobo and Carol Westby (2013) describe a nonlinear process by which one teacher modified and expanded a Moon-focused science learning activity in response to student (and eventually parent) contributions. The initial outcomes of this activity differed greatly from the teacher’s original plan; however, instead of seeing this outcome as a failure of her plan, the teacher saw (and used) it as an opportunity to successfully engage students and their families in designing a longer, more thought-provoking science learning experience. By engaging in such nonlinear processes, we can center students’ interests and honor their own choices for establishing purpose in writing.

Letting go of linearity and engaging with a parent’s constructive critique

To illustrate how this might work, we share an example drawn from a qualitative research project that one of us recently conducted in a professional development workshop series. The monthlong, three-workshop series focused on helping teachers understand research on both CRP and writing to learn in science, as well as points of convergence between these frameworks. Qualitative research on professional development participants’ experiences was approved by the Southern Methodist University Institutional Review Board (protocol H20-161-SEDQ) and all teachers in attendance consented to participate in research. One of the workshop participants, Cathy (a pseudonym), was a white female science teacher with a long career of working to advance equity and social justice through her teaching. Halfway through the workshop series, Cathy decided to implement a student writing activity centered on the life of Henrietta Lacks. Her students read a short text and watched a series of videos about Ms. Lacks and the “HeLa” cell line taken from her body without consent or compensation. Students were then prompted to write reflections on the science content discussed in the text and videos, and finally to compose an argumentative essay focused on humans’ bodily autonomy and legal rights in the biosciences. Similar activities are increasingly common in postsecondary life sciences education (see for example Jordan and Bonds 2015). Importantly, while some of these materials made direct references to the injustices Ms. Lacks experienced, the word “racism” was not initially mentioned in the teacher’s explanation of the activity nor in the writing questions that accompanied the task.

The night after implementing this activity, Cathy received an email from a concerned parent. This parent argued that racism needed to be explicitly discussed in such a lesson–both so that students would understand the historical context of Ms. Lacks’s experiences, and so that they could understand the continued existence of medical racism in the present day and age. Cathy contacted Quentin, wondering whether this critical response meant the lesson had been a failure.

However, we discussed the email together and concluded that the parent’s critique might also be interpreted as an important indicator of certain successes: first, of Cathy’s positive relationships with her students, and second, of her willingness to engage with issues of social justice. After all, if the concerned student and parent did not trust that Cathy would actually listen to their input, they could have complained about the activity on social media, called the school principal, or said nothing at all. And if Cathy had not created an opportunity to discuss injustice by asking students to write about Ms. Lacks’s experiences, the issue of making racism explicit might never have arisen.

Indeed, the parent’s email itself could be interpreted as an example of science writing for authentic purposes–brought about not because Cathy directly solicited parent input, but because she created an opportunity for students to reflect on issues of inequity and discuss these issues with loved ones; because at least one parent felt inspired to pursue their own purpose(s) by pushing this conversation forward; and because (one might argue) Cathy had created a classroom environment in which this parent felt reasonably confident that their voice might be heard, respected, and taken seriously. Cathy’s implementation of CRP (e.g., by providing her students with rigorous learning opportunities and supporting their development of critical consciousness) may well have helped to create these conditions.

Heartened by the conclusion that a student and parent had trusted her enough to offer their unsolicited critical input, Cathy modified her instruction based on this input. She designed a follow-up activity in which students shared their writing with peers and engaged in small-group discussions explicitly focused on racism. She also planned a redesign of her activity for the following year, one which would explicitly invite students to write about racism and tie Henrietta Lacks’s experiences to present-day medical racism faced by many African Americans and other marginalized groups.

Although the original focus and details of the writing activity may have been chosen by the teacher, the activity did not end with the teacher’s purposes alone. Rather, it prompted unsolicited and constructively critical feedback from a parent, and the teacher adapted her instruction in response to this input. We hypothesize that this type of classroom interaction might contribute to several desirable learning outcomes, including increased scientific knowledge, increased awareness of historical racism, and increased argumentation skills (the teacher’s initial goals for the activity) as well as growth in students’ knowledge of present-day racism, trust and respect for their teacher, and inclination to offer unsolicited feedback and advocacy in future situations (new goals advanced by the parent’s email and Cathy’s response). We also argue that Cathy’s use of CRP and her strong relationships with her students helped create conditions under which this type of interaction could take place. Cathy’s explicit attention to social (in)justice in her curriculum may well have been essential; if this particular lesson had not highlighted the injustices visited upon Henrietta Lacks, and if Cathy had not similarly highlighted injustices in previous lessons, it is unclear whether the student or parent would have felt comfortable enough to pursue their own purpose(s) by calling for a more explicit discussion of medical racism.

Importantly, we are not suggesting teachers automatically or uncritically implement all parent or student suggestions. Feedback should be carefully analyzed and considered, as not all feedback is constructive. In fact, some feedback might inadvertently or purposely reproduce oppressive systems or narratives. Cathy’s experiences took place after the most recent rise in political activism opposed to school-based discussions of the realities of racial injustice (Morgan 2022). However, there were important differences between the parental critique that Cathy heard and many of the politician-driven (and in some cases parent-driven) critiques recently made of school-based discussions of racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression. The history and continuing legacy of racism inside and outside the medical profession, and the harms this racism has wrought and continues to wreak on Black Americans, have been extensively documented by historians of science and social scientists (see for example Bailey 2021; Bleich 2021; Washington 2006). A parent or politician who argued against discussing the significance of racism in a lesson on Ms. Lacks would be arguing to censor key historical and present-day context, leaving students less knowledgeable, less scientifically literate, and less prepared to understand the complex relationships between science and U.S. society, while leaving systems of anti-Black racism and White supremacy invisible and unchallenged. Teachers and administrators must carefully consider how to respond to feedback in ways that disrupt, rather than reproduce, oppressive systems or narratives.

This approach has the added benefit of validating and valuing deviations from a linear, predetermined science writing process. The issue of linearity and nonlinearity is increasingly prominent in science education, as science educators have worked to undo the widespread and popular–but problematic and overly reductive–narrative of a linear “scientific method” (Windschitl, Thompson and Braaten 2008). Just as the process of doing science is fundamentally iterative and often includes unpredicted insights, setbacks, or disruptions, the process of writing science can also be iterative and include unpredicted insights, setbacks, or disruptions. The writing process is one that requires repeated and iterative revising and reframing of arguments and ideas. While setbacks and disruptions have sometimes been interpreted as problems or failures, we argue that–in keeping with the disciplinary norms of both science and writing–many such events actually represent successes.

We use this example to show how CRP can focus our attention on the types of classroom and classroom-adjacent interactions that might create conditions where students become increasingly likely to pursue their own purposes through writing. We do not claim this is the only plausible interpretation of Cathy’s narrative, but it is a plausible interpretation, and is (we argue) a generative one. Further research on science writing explicitly guided by a CRP framework could test this interpretation and advance the fields of science education, writing education, and education more broadly.

When teachers elicit students’ perspectives, values, and linguistic repertoires, pay close attention to these, and create a classroom environment in which students want to share and actively do share unsolicited perspectives, values, and linguistic repertoires, we argue that a wealth of learning outcomes might be positively altered. Writing to learn research in science education and other fields should further explore how to create these conditions, using CRP as a framework to generate pedagogical innovations and research questions. Researchers and teachers who wish to cultivate authentic purposes for writing might draw on additional frameworks related to CRP, such as funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff and Gonzalez 1992), the moral ethic of cariño (Lomelí, 2023) and community cultural wealth (Yosso 2005), through which students’ existing knowledge and perspectives can be drawn upon, nurturing students’ scientific interpretations and ideas. This process centers students' knowledge and interests, increasing the likelihood that students identify authentic reasons to engage with content relevant and meaningful to them.

In Table 2, we have provided strategies that might guide our thinking on how to cultivate writing for authentic purposes.

Table 2 Strategies for centering students’ authentic purposes for science writing
Full size table

We do not claim to be the first authors to conceive of such an approach. CRP is not new; the term is by now nearly three decades old, and the practices and pedagogies it describes have existed for far longer (Ladson-Billings 1995a, b). Meanwhile, our conception of authenticity is similar to those promulgated by McQuitty, Dotger and Khan (2010) and by Nadia Behizadeh (2019). Behizadeh, working in literacy education (but not science education in particular), argues that authenticity should be defined as “students’ perception that a writing task connects to their life, that the task is meaningful to them and connects to their experiences, culture, interests, and goals” (p. 411–412). In her work, Behizadeh and a collaborating teacher invited students to share their own ideas about what makes a writing task authentic, and then used these ideas–in conjunction with their own knowledge of writing research and the school system’s goals for writing instruction–to shape writing tasks. They found that students valued choice of writing topics; that some students critiqued the perceived constraints of writing using a particular structure or genre; and that students wanted to impact real (not merely imagined) audiences beyond the classroom through their writing. Behizadeh argues that instruction focused on social justice could provide an avenue for achieving many of these purposes. We argue that this approach would be similarly useful in science education, and that CRP might provide an effective framework for implementing such practices. Similarly, Derek Hodson (2003) and Gail Hildebrand (1998) have each written about the need for science education and/or science writing to help students develop sociopolitical consciousness and disrupt hegemonic systems.

Other benefits of a culturally relevant approach to science writing

Using the CRP-aligned strategies discussed in Table 2 could go beyond benefiting students to benefit teachers and communities as well. Writing activities with authentic purposes and audiences could help teachers build stronger connections between student science learning and students’ relationships with parents or other community members. These relationships are important in and of themselves. They also have the potential to directly support student interest and engagement in science. Although little research has focused specifically on science writing to parents or community members, a growing body of research has demonstrated the value of science communication to such audiences. Students may take considerable pride in communicating to audiences that matter in their lives. For example, in a study of justice-centered science pedagogy, Morales-Doyle writes that for one high school chemistry student,

[a community] presentation [on local soil pollution] was the work from the course in which she takes the most pride because of her ability to explain the soil project in terms the audience understood. She said that the most impactful lesson she learned from the experience was the importance of “code switching” or moving between academic and vernacular forms of communication (2017 p. 1053).

Parents, community members, and society at large may benefit from students’ communication with authentic audiences as well. Morales-Doyle (2017) writes that community members found presentations on local environmental concerns more compelling when delivered by students rather than by professional scientists, and Danielle Lawson, Kathryn Stevenson, M. Nils Peterson, Sarah Carrier, Renee Strnad and Erin Seekamp (2019) have experimentally demonstrated that children can increase their parents’ levels of concern about climate change, with strongest effects among adults who initially had the lowest levels of concern. Thus, increasing student writing about science for authentic purposes and audiences could contribute to increased scientific literacy among the broader community beyond the school.

Finally, national standards documents in the U.S imply that science writing for audiences beyond the teacher is important as a goal in and of itself, one which presumably benefits the entire populace. The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts state that grade 9 and 10 students in science and other subjects should be able to use writing to:

Develop claim(s) and counterclaims fairly, supplying data and evidence for each while pointing out the strengths and limitations of both claim(s) and counterclaims in a discipline-appropriate form and in a manner that anticipates the audience’s knowledge level and concerns (NGAC and CCSSO 2010).

The standards also state that students in grades 11 and 12 should be able to consider the “values and possible biases” of their audiences (NGAC and CCSSO 2010). Although neither of these standards specifies particular audiences, it seems unlikely that the only audience(s) encompassed by these statements are students’ teachers or their immediate classmates. In particular, the references to knowledge level and possible biases imply that students must write to a variety of audiences, and the references to anticipation suggest that students should write to audiences beyond the classroom whose knowledge levels or biases cannot be immediately or readily ascertained. While students can (and, in many classrooms, already do) write about science for imaginary audiences beyond the classroom, it is possible that writing for real audiences beyond the classroom might be an even more useful exercise.

Limitations

This work is not without its potential pitfalls. In particular, we want to avoid the “watering down” of CRP. The misunderstanding, misrepresentation, or misuse of CRP is all too common, both in science education (Underwood and Mensah 2018) and in education more broadly (Sleeter 2012). Our argument should not be seen as reducing CRP to the mere act of asking students to write for authentic purposes and audiences.

We also want to avoid becoming bogged down in a neoliberal “utilitarian CRP.” When CRP is presented as a theoretical framework, science teachers often struggle to understand how they might instantiate this framework in practice (Brown, Boda, Lemmi and Monroe 2019). When it is instead presented as a set of practices, we have found that many science teachers are sometimes skeptical of these practices’ value until and unless they encounter quantitative research showing these practices can improve students’ performance on standardized tests, GPA, or other traditional measures of success (for an example of such quantitative research, see Dee and Penner 2018). Science teacher educators (including us) sometimes share such research with science teachers in the hopes of persuading them to learn and implement practices associated with CRP. However, doing so may generate (or at least perpetuate) a key misunderstanding: that practices which support students’ cultural competence and critical consciousness are only important insofar as they advance students’ academic success along traditional metrics, rather than advancing students’ academic success as well as other distinct goals that are important in and of themselves.

In a recent collaboration with colleagues (Román, Arias, Sedlacek and Pérez 2022), we came to refer to this misunderstanding as “utilitarian CRP,” and we worry about the ways in which it functions as yet another neoliberal dilution of Ladson-Billings’s original framework. While we draw on both CRP research and writing to learn research to advance our argument, we reject the implication that CRP is only useful if validated by research grounded in historically privileged methodologies or outcomes. CRP is a framework organized around a set of goals rather than a static and narrowly defined set of practices, and goals such as sustaining cultural competence and developing critical consciousness are important from a normative (not merely an empirical) standpoint.

Implications

The use of CRP as a framework to operationalize science writing for authentic purposes can push science education forward by suggesting new practices–or rather, by suggesting rare practices be more widely implemented and be researched in greater depth. In this section, we explore some of the practices suggested by our analysis.

Supporting academic success

Use a process writing approach that includes feedback from peers and adults, opportunities for self-assessment, and opportunities for revision. Using process writing in the science classroom may strengthen students′ ability to organize and express their ideas in varied ways including, but not limited to, the use of discipline-specific language. Providing students the opportunity to engage in a peer review process, in which they engage with each other’s writing and ideas, can foster a learning community in which students position themselves and each other as experts. The writing process is a multi-stepped process that requires revisions and extends students the opportunity to edit their own work over time. Engaging in the writing process in the science classroom extends students’ opportunities to grow in this skill and support their own academic success.

Sustaining and developing cultural competence

Center the work of scientists of color and female scientists, including as topics for student writing. Recent research in college science education has used reading and writing activities called “scientist spotlights” to highlight the work of researchers with marginalized racial and ethnic identities, changing students’ stereotypes about who belongs in science and even improving students’ grades in some studies (e.g., Schinske, Perkins, Snyder and Wyer 2016). However, many of these studies use different outcome measures, and findings about the effects of such activities at the K-12 level have as yet been inconsistent (Hoffman and Kurtz-Costes 2019). Expanded use of this type of science writing activity and further testing of its effects could help researchers and practitioners identify not only the effects of such activities on student achievement, but how they might support positive racialization and identity development experiences in schools (Nasir 2012).

Create opportunities for students to write using any and all elements of their linguistic repertoires, including English, Spanish, translanguaging, African American Language (King 2020), etc., and provide students with examples of multilingual or translingual texts. Translanguaging is an increasingly prominent framework in science education, as seen in the recent call for submissions to a special issue of JRST focused on translanguaging (Pérez, González-Howard and Suárez 2022). Further work is needed in this area, however, and even less work has examined the role of dialect diversity and historically marginalized varieties such as African American Language in science education (Charity Hudley and Mallinson 2017). Scholars have posited that there is a distinction between language of ideas and language of display as a means to reconceptualize what counts as “academic language” (Bunch 2014) and contest what language is appropriate to use in academic settings (Flores and Rosa 2015). We further expand on this work by suggesting that, in order to reshape the curriculum of science (and science writing) to be less Eurocentric, teachers should create (and researchers should study) opportunities for science writing in which students can utilize all elements of their linguistic repertoires.

Engage students in writing for siblings, parents, community members, and other audiences beyond the classroom, and facilitate feedback from or interaction with these audiences. As mentioned above, a growing body of science education research indicates the value of asking students to communicate with audiences beyond the classroom–audiences such as younger peers (Gunel, Hand and McDermott 2009), older peers (Chen, Hand and McDowell 2013), and parents or other community members (Morales-Doyle 2017). However, these studies use audiences of varying immediacy: Gunel, Hand and McDermott (2009) and Chen, Hand and McDowell (2013) had students write to peers or other audiences and then receive feedback from these audiences at a later time, while Morales-Doyle (2017) had students verbally present their written work to community members at in-person events. Expanded use of science writing activities with audiences beyond the classroom could advance the goals of CRP by providing students with opportunities to draw upon their own funds of knowledge and cultural wealth, while simultaneously providing learning science researchers with new opportunities to study writing as a socially situated cognitive process (e.g., by examining how factors such as audience immediacy or the timing of feedback may influence the outcomes of writing activities).

Cultivating critical consciousness

Provide student choices in their writing, not only in terms of topics but also in terms of format, genre, and audiences. Prain and Hand (1996) outline a model of student science writing that considers the interrelatedness of these dimensions of a writing activity and the role of student choice (alongside teacher choice) in determining these dimensions of a writing task. We agree with this recommendation, as choices seem likely to help elicit students’ authentic purposes for science writing while also increasing students’ motivation to engage with the writing process. Additional research on student choice, and particularly students’ choice of audience(s), could help researchers understand the complex interplay of cognitive and sociocultural processes at work in writing. Consider, for example, the benefits of writing for audiences beyond the classroom (describe above). The leading extant theory to explain these effects is that when students write for their teacher or peers, they tend to simply try to reproduce the ideas and language presented in the classroom curriculum, whereas writing for an audience beyond the classroom pushes students to “translate” their thinking and generate deeper understandings in the process (Gunel, Hand and Prain 2007). However, is possible that other mechanisms are at work as well–for instance, motivational factors may arise when students write for an audience they hope to impress. If this is true, then the exact audience for students’ writing may be less important than the extent of students’ interest in writing for a particular audience, or their interest in writing a particular genre or format. Further research on students’ social cognition while writing could resolve these unknowns.

Engage students in learning about and discussing how scientists or scientific discoveries have contributed to or combated specific social inequities, and begin such conversations prior to or early in the writing process. There is already a thriving literature on socioscientific issues (SSIs) in science education. However, a recent review of this literature by Licui Chen and Sihan Xiao (2021) found that teachers in the U.S. and other countries “tend to hold an instrumental view of SSIs, regarding them as a means to merely contextualize or reframe content knowledge to motivate students to learn it” (p. 10). Furthermore, such issues are rarely incorporated into curriculum on a regular or systematic basis; instead, such issues are often treated as “add-ons” that are “discussed only when the issues happened to be brought up in…lessons” (p. 8). The substantial and growing research literature on CRP in science could contribute greatly to this literature (see for example Madkins and McKinney de Royston 2019). Expanded use of science writing activities that explicitly center issues of (in)equity and (in)justice could facilitate curriculum development (thereby supporting teachers who hope to implement such activities) while also facilitating research into the social and cognitive processes at work as science teachers and K-12 students engage with these issues.

Make substantive and public changes to writing activities in response to both solicited and unsolicited input from students, parents, etc. Cathy’s example is instructive in this regard: when a parent offered unsolicited critical input, Cathy could have ignored this input, but instead chose to make explicit changes to her instruction based on this input. While we have no direct evidence about the effect of her decision on students and parents, we believe it is likely that the act of validating parental concerns probably makes students and parents more likely to share such input in the future–a development which could help teachers and students better align their purposes for writing and other instructional activities. Future research could seek to quantitatively and qualitatively document both the occurrence and the effects of students’ and parents’ contributions to science classroom decision making.

Conclusion

In this work we offer a definition of “authentic purposes for science writing” informed by the goals of CRP (Ladson-Billings 1995b). We also offer a set of seven strategies, shown in Table 2, for centering students’ authentic purposes for science writing, undergirded by common strategies for operationalizing CRP (Morrison, Robbins and Rose 2008). These strategies include: (1) Use a process writing approach that includes feedback from peers and adults, opportunities for self-assessment, and opportunities for revision; (2) center the work of scientists of color and female scientists, including as topics for student writing; (3) create opportunities for students to write using any and all elements of their linguistic repertoires; (4) engage students in writing for siblings, parents, community members, and other audiences beyond the classroom, and facilitate feedback from or interaction with these audiences; (5) provide student choices in their writing, not only in terms of topics but also in terms of formats, genres, and audiences; (6) engage students in learning about and discussing how scientists or scientific discoveries have contributed to or combated specific social inequities, and begin such conversations prior to or early in the writing process; and (7) make substantive and public changes to writing activities in response to both solicited and unsolicited input from students and parents. We offer these strategies both as recommendations for practitioners and as an agenda for researchers.