NARST 100th Annual International Conference
Braiding Pasts, Presents, and Futures:
Crossing Borders in Performing Science Education Research

NARST is turning 100 years old! As our association is reaching its centennial milestone, we are all called to reflect, to act, and to imagine the future of science education and science education research. This invites us to rekindle commitments to diversity of people, scholarship, communities, approaches, and journeys that constitute our collective pursuit of strengthening science literacy. It is a time to celebrate our varied histories, trajectories, identities, languages, geographies, and ways of being and engaging in the world, learn from the past, and envision spaces and places where science education transforms lives. 

The Akan people’s sankofa, the Greeks’ anamnisi, the Māori people’s ka mua, ka muri, the Jewish people’s l’dor v’dor, the Arab culture’s irjiʿ lita’khudh al‑ḥikma, Latin America’s rescate de la memoria movements, and ample other cultural wisdom inspire us to reach back to construct what we may have forgotten, silenced, lost, missed, and achieved. These ways of remembering illuminate our present praxis and craft the promise of imagined new futures. Considering science education as practices that can empower life and liberty for all peoples compels us to embrace expansive views of how knowledge is produced, valued, and used. It challenges us to disrupt hierarchies that constrain access and transformation and to uphold the axiom that high-quality science education is a human right. The Greek song "O Thromos / The Street" – The street had its own history; Someone wrote it with paint on the wall; It was only one word, ‘freedom’; And then they said children wrote it – invigorates for me this calling. It inspires interrogating our pasts, learning from children, youth, adults, and elders with whom we live, work, teach, and study, and pondering how science education scholarship contributes to vibrant communities, to freedom in all its forms, and to hope for humanity. 

At the NARST centennial conference, let us ponder about knowledges and identities, share wide-ranging scholarship, elevate varied voices, grapple with challenges and opportunities, and leverage the arts as a way of knowing and being. Let us engage with realities while problem posing and problem solving, support one another through mentorship, learn from each other, and consider critical love in our research and in our interactions to re-collect and re-cognize. Science education and the research pursued by NARST members have shaped, and been shaped by, who we have been, who we are becoming, and who we will be as an association entering its second century. It is my hope that the 2027 centennial conference creates places and spaces for our growing, diverse, global community to perform collaboration, mutual learning, the wisdom of many, and border crossing in topics, framings, methods, and presentation formats. In doing so, we can amplify goals and aspirations of science education scholarship and practice that strive toward transformation.