REJOINDER - SPECIAL ISSUE: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF NGSS Working with and Shifting the System: A response to Elby's commentary Leema Berland 1 | Eve Manz 2 | Emily Miller 1 | David Stroupe 3 1 Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 2 Science Education, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 3 Teacher Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan Correspondence David Stroupe, Teacher Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan. Email: dstroupe@msu.edu Elby's response to our article concerning epistemic agency and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) sparked productive discussions within our team, which we share here. In particu- lar, Elby analyzes the origin of the NGSS's pairing of content understandings with student participa- tion in scientific practices, arguing that the Framework has a consistent, often tacit, emphasis on content over practices. As we argued in our original piece, a focus on practices has the potential to create more opportunities for students to act with epistemic agency because it prioritizes student sen- semaking, and how students engage in sensemaking, over memorization of specific content. In other words, “participation in the practices is a route away from students' typical roles as passive recipients of information” (Miller, Manz, Russ, Stroupe, & Berland, 2018, p. 1,061). Elby argues that the Framework “contains the seed of its own complacent enactment” because it sets up the structure of pairing a practice with a declarative statement of content knowledge, and of prioritizing the content in that pairing. In this response to Elby, we agree that this prioritization is evident in the Framework and explore how unresolved conundrums, such as the tension between knowledge and practice, can be traced back from NGSS to the Framework and further outwards. Identifying and exploring these sorts of contradictions and conundrums illuminates the space between intentions for the science standards and their potential for use (or misuse), and as such, is essential to continuing to work with the Framework and NGSS. The goal of students being positioned as, and perceiving themselves to be, initiators and doers of scientific reasoning—or as epistemic agents—has been approached from many angles. We, as a field, have worked to depict, define, design for, evaluate, make equitable, and explore the value of, versions of epistemic agency for decades (e.g., Barton & Osborne, 1995; Crawford, 2000; Gómez Fernández & Siry, 2018; Lee & Luykx, 2005; Mensah, 2013; Varelas, Settlage, & Mensah, 2015). Moreover, many science educators working on NGSS implementation, across both curriculum development and teacher learning, emphasize the importance of shifting students' roles in knowledge building (Hakuta, Santos, & Fang, 2013; Lee, Miller, & Januszyk, 2014; Penuel, Harris, & DeBarger, 2015; Reiser, 2013). In our original paper, we chose to juxtapose the goal of shifting students' epistemic roles in knowledge building with the NGSS, because we hoped (and still do hope) that NGSS could work as a lever on this Received: 1 February 2019 Accepted: 2 February 2019 DOI: 10.1002/tea.21543 J Res Sci Teach. 2019;56:521–525. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/tea © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 521