The aim of this article is to develop knowledge about recently arrived students’ agency in learning science in upper secondary school in Sweden. The material was created through observations and stimulated-recall interviews with four students. The multimodal and multilingual practices students were involved in, and the diverse strategies they used in these lessons, were enabled by their access to multilingual teaching material. Our main conclusion is that students’ own agency becomes a prerequisite for learning in these classrooms, but that too much responsibility is put on the students to understand and learn the content and to develop required language skills.