#617: Making Science Ours: Inclusive Discourse, Legitimation, and the Formation of Learning Communities

This study investigates how teachers’ inclusive discourse, particularly the use of the pronoun we, shapes students’ participation, belonging, and identity development in science learning. Grounded in a sociocultural perspective, the analysis examines how language mediates legitimate access to the practices and norms of scientific inquiry. Drawing on classroom interactions from a two-week STEAM program with multilingual youth, we show that the teacher’s strategic use of we during moments of uncertainty, procedural error, and conceptual ambiguity reorganized epistemic authority, reframed mistakes as data, and positioned students as co-participants in scientific sense-making. Rather than treating we as inherently inclusive, the findings reveal its power as a responsive and situational discursive resource that opens participation when it is most at risk. This work highlights how teachers’ linguistic attunement can transform classroom talk into a form of apprenticeship that cultivates belonging, agency, and authentic engagement in science.