Is It Political? Science Teachers' Perspectives on GSD‐Inclusive Science Teaching

ABSTRACT Teaching is often framed as neutral and apolitical, yet scholarship has long documented its entanglement with power, identity, and ideology. Despite growing attention to the sociopolitical dimensions of science education, less is known about what science teachers themselves understand as political and how those understandings shape where they locate political responsibility. This qualitative study examines how 16 secondary science teachers conceptualize teaching and gender‐ and sexual‐diversity‐inclusive science teaching (GSDST) as political or apolitical within a Midwestern U.S. state. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews and guided by ecological systems theory, we analyzed what teachers understood as making teaching and GSDST political and where they located political influence and responsibility across ecological systems. While most teachers described teaching as inherently political, GSDST was frequently framed as political because it had been politicized by others (e.g., parents, media, policy). We characterize this pattern as a displacement of political responsibility, through which teachers recognized the broader politicization of GSDST while locating its politics primarily outside their own instructional practice. Political sensemaking varied by locale, professional development participation, years of teaching experience, and identity, demonstrating how individual and structural conditions shaped where teachers located political responsibility. Neutrality functioned simultaneously as a protective strategy and as a discursive constraint that could obscure the political dimensions of instructional decisions. These findings highlight the importance of cultivating political consciousness while attending to the structural conditions that shape teachers' possibilities for justice‐oriented science teaching.