As SEEDS, we recognize that science education has often obscured, failed to address, or even actively contributed to injustices. Work is beginning to spotlight long-standing concerns now named as climate injustice, imperial and settler colonialism, militarism, racial capitalism, ableism, nativism, linguicism, cisheteropatriarchy, and transphobia. We also affirm the perennial presence, profound contributions, and essential perspectives of people whose knowledges have long been erased or appropriated by the sciences and schooling. Many of us continue to live and work on stolen lands whose millennia of human stories of survival and resistance have been subject to continual (and unsuccessful) attempts at elimination. SEEDS aims to nurture collective work across sites of science teaching and learning to help address these challenges.

SEEDS germinated in 2016, sprouting a movement at the start of shifts in national, state, and local policies that would attempt to erase or even criminalize the teaching of these histories. Ever since, we have gathered in person and virtually to sharpen one another’s political clarity and replenish one another with insights, comradery, and encouragement. We will join together October 10-13, 2025 in Philadelphia, PA to deepen our connections, draw strength from suppressed histories, and share tactics for teaching, organizing, researching, and reimagining science education. We seek to make this road by walking it together.

Always Been Here

It can feel like we are living in an entirely unprecedented time. As James Baldwin wrote,

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

To move forward, we often must reach back and gather the lessons the past has to teach us.Authoritarian governance, unrelenting assaults on civilians, threats of deportation, reversals of hard-won rights, unmet calls for climate action (let alone climate reparations), and attempts to suppress peoples whose very existence and sovereignty question the moral surety of an extant social order are not new. Yet amidst these threats and challenges, there have always been people who have resisted and persisted with radical hope for a better future.

Science curricula (including textbooks promoting eugenics) have propagated a myth of science as a purified space of whiteness, masculinity, or exceptional individual ability. Yet, there have been fugitive sciences and fugitive pedagogies, along with movements striving for change within and beyond institutional boundaries. Likewise, the myth that trans children are entirely new to society erases long histories of trans existence, histories that might provide our field with expansive possibilities of nonconformity, imaginative play, and embodied kinship. And, long before the academic terms appeared, classroom teachers have continually engaged in creative insubordination, while youth have often taken the lead as transformative intellectuals.

Connecting Our Histories

'Diversity' is not new to science. The sciences have been and continue to be created, revised, and repurposed by people around the world. This reality, however, has been obscured by centuries of erasure, appropriation, and attempts to claim authorship over the contributions of individuals racialized as non-white or gendered outside a cis-male norm. Similarly, there has never been one singular science education. Instead, we can see segregated, unequal science educations that claimed to divide and order people along hierarchies of knowing, feeling, languaging, and being.

Yet, crucially, schools and classrooms marked as segregated, often subject to damage-centered narratives of being underresourced and underserved, have never been reducible to lack. Our field is just beginning to recognize how Indigenous, Black, Chicanx and Puerto Rican, and trans educators, among others, have long identified abundance within unjust conditions and found innovative ways of repurposing education toward self-determination. We look to language reclamation schools. Escuelitas. Freedom Schools and Highlander. The Black Teacher Project. Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Wóuŋspe (Defenders of the Water School). Education already has been—and therefore can still be—otherwise.

Sustaining Collective Action

We invite proposals that help us learn from one another and connect the projects we’re pursuing toward aims such as racial, linguistic, gender, dis/ability, environmental, or climate justice. SEEDS does not feel like a typical conference, in part because our session formats nurture dialogue, embrace dissensus, and encourage everyone to bring their genuine questions, unique contributions, and emerging insights together in generative conversation and action.

Your SEEDS 2025 session might include (but is certainly not limited to) examples that:

• Elevate and honor the work of educators marginalized in science education;
• Examine how older mechanisms of exclusion and assimilation may be taking new forms;
• Explore youth- or family-led efforts to challenge unjust policies or create spaces of affirmation, joy, and aliveness;
• Identify the power of communities (whether local or transnational) in forging coalitions, navigating repressive landscapes, and enacting meaningful change; and/or
• Expand our repertoires of strategies to support learning and unlearning and moving closer to embodying our ethical and sociopolitical commitments.

We hope SEEDS 2025 can provide us the space and time to create reinvigorating connections. We reach back to dream forward, digging into questions of where we’ve been, what we can do, why it matters, and how we can further strengthen, interlink, and sustain these collective efforts.