Our Work
The Expressive STEM Research Collective studies how expressive STEM learning, built on multimodal literacies, heritage stories, and hands-on material inquiry, grows imagination and creative confidence across intergenerational family networks. We work with research frameworks that see participants as co-learners and co-researchers, not simply as subjects, to trace how learning moves through families and communities over time. We want to understand how learning together builds community belongingness and stakeholdership, and how creative confidence can be described as an emergent property of a learning ecology, closer to a weather system than to a chain of dominoes.
The ESC is anchored at Texas State University and funded by the National Science Foundation’s Advancing Informal STEM Learning program (NSF Award #2517055, 2025–2028). We work alongside a network of community partners in San Marcos, Texas.
At the ESC, our work returns to a few core questions:
- How do tools, materials, and stories spark inquiry and invention among learners of any age?
- How does noticing and building on capacities already present — in a teacher’s classroom, a family’s playshop, a child’s story — grow confidence over time?
- How does this kind of learning, and doing research about it together, build belonging within a community?
A Family of Projects
The ESC Research Collective is a family of interlocking projects, including Families Learning Together, EPK-2, Beautiful Books, Material Inquiry, and the work still ahead.
Families Learning Together (FLT)
Since 2017, FLT has built a community-based learning network anchored at Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos and the San Marcos Public Library, later joined by the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment. Families gather at playshops built on the premise that everyone teaches, everyone learns.
EPK-2
Exploring Early Childhood Teachers’ Abilities to Identify Computational Thinking Precursors was an NSF-funded research project led by Sean Justice and Lori Assaf from 2020-2024. EPK-2 studied how early childhood teachers came to notice and name computational thinking already present in their literacy-rich classrooms. The project built the professional development model and theoretical foundation the Collective still draws on.
Beautiful Books
Led by Lori Assaf, Beautiful Books paired Texas State teacher candidates with young children to write, illustrate, and dramatize their own stories using ScratchJr, an early-childhood coding platform. The project extended EPK-2’s approach to computational thinking to early literacy and storytelling.
Material Inquiry
Material Inquiry, at the core of the Collective’s approach to research itself, is a way of thinking about tools and materials as active partners in learning rather than passive instruments. Developed by Sean Justice and collaborators, it shapes how ESC researchers gather and interpret data with families, teachers, undergraduates, and other participants.
Expressive STEM Research Collective
The current three-year study (NSF #2517055, 2025–2028) brings this lineage into the present, inviting FLT families and facilitators to become co-researchers alongside the university team. Together we’re asking how intergenerational STEM learning builds sustainable literacies and tools at a community level, and how creative confidence disrupts what we assume about family and community capacity for change. At its core, the ESC is asking how learning and doing research together builds belonging and community stakeholdership.
ESC Research Collective
The ESC Research Collective is an NSF-funded research project investigating how families, youth, and community members learn, make, and imagine together.