ABSTRACT Though educators and researchers have developed shared theory and language for priorities necessary to disrupt the status quo toward more equitable science education, we lack a tool that organizes sets of teaching practices across an instructional unit to support enactment and rehearsal. Core sets of practices, such as those included in the Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) framework (Windschitl et al. 2018), have been shown to nurture diverse students' access, achievement, and identities in science. Though valuable, they stop short of meeting more critical demands of equity, namely that of challenging and expanding what counts as science and using science to transform social injustice. Toward this end, this paper offers the theoretical warrant for the Justice‐centered ambitious Science Teaching (JuST) Framework, empirically developed and conceptually aligned with current priorities related to justice‐centered science pedagogy. Building on and extending AST, JuST works toward shaping science education in ways that reflect the diversity of sensemaking repertoires of the students in any given classroom and uses science for purposes that matter to them and work toward more just futures. The JuST‐FW offers educators and scholars a common organizational tool, language,Davis and core practices as scaffolds for centering justice in planning for and teaching ambitious science units as well as collaboratively reflecting on practice with a common tool.
Luehmann et al. (2026) studied this question.