Joyful Transgressions and Radical Imagination in Science Education      

The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility, we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. -bell hooks 

What could science teaching, learning and research look like in our wildest dreams?  What could science teachers, learners, communities, and researchers be saying, thinking, doing, and feeling? What could be the priorities of science education? 

Urgent times calls for radical actions and opportunities to collectively imagine different worlds and plot futures where we all can flourish. Uncertainty and global transitions create openings for radical world-building—moving beyond what is given, including the imaginations imposed by those in power. Could we dare to envision a world where everyone can thrive, where the flourishing of all humans and more-than-humans is the status quo?  As such, it is imperative that we locate and create spaces of hope, imagination, and joy in science education—spaces where we re-envision how we can live well together on this pale blue dot that we call home.

The NARST 2026 annual meeting invites us to collectively imagine and build a world where scientific knowledge making is connected to lived experience and recorded through, as Sylvia Wynter suggests, “representational and biological feelings,” and the creation of spaces where “there is unlimited access to the pleasure and power of knowing,” as bell hooks advocates. This challenges us to re-engage with the fully human aspects of science learning considering some of the following provocations: What would happen if we considered play in science learning across contexts and lifespan? What joyful methodologies could we employ to research science learning? How could we enact care alongside students, teachers, communities, and peers in our work? What would happen if we started our projects from a place of trust and relationship-building? Given that NARST's ultimate goal is to help all learners achieve science literacy, how might we reimagine science literacy with social, environmental, and epistemological justice at its core? 

This conference theme invites us to share the ways that we can transgress canonical boundaries in science education and expand dialogues on strategies for disrupting structures that sustain inequities, and in the spirit of bell hooks, “[envision] new, alternative, oppositional aesthetic acts that both challenge and transcend [given] frameworks and limitations.”  This conference is a step toward forging deeper connections between science and social life across formal, informal, and lived contexts—unpacking histories, reimagining relationships with science, and ultimately working toward a scientific endeavor of joyful transgressions and world-building. Together, we will envision and enact future-oriented approaches that cultivate a radical reimagining of what science education—and the world—can be.