“There Are Places Full of Beauty”: Desettling High School Students' Scientific Writing

ABSTRACT This study contributes to desettling and expanding expectations about the forms of scientific language that belong in students' scientific writing. The primary empirical focus is the analysis of 52 high school student abstracts articulating community‐based investigations, submitted as part of their participation in a student conference in a big US city. Methodologically, constructivist grounded theory and discourse analysis are utilized to investigate how students communicated intentions and priorities in their science writing as evidenced through the weaving of their linguistic and extralinguistic choices. The study found that students articulated civic‐oriented versions of science practices in places consequential to their real‐world. Their grammar and genre choices departed from conventional depersonalized and atemporal writing in school science. Evidenced are the ways in which students take up the genre of abstracts alongside community‐based priorities to weave three modes of civic science education. Further, students writing and the forms of we they utilized also reflected collective, caring, and ethical commitments that not only identified harms but also beauty as worthy of scientific investigations. The meanings students construct show how scientific language and writing, including grammar(s) and genre(s), are entangled with ideology, ethics, pedagogy, and decision‐making. This study calls for teachers, designers, and researchers to prioritize collective learning, ethical sense‐making, and considerations of justice—rather than normed sections, genres, or grammars in students' scientific writing. This study suggests attending to grammar and genre in scientific writing helps support [trans]disciplinary learning and sustainable, ethical forms of human development more broadly.