Our Work
The Expressive STEM Research Collective studies how expressive STEM learning, built on hands-on material inquiry and multimodal literacies, 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 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 becomes an emergent property of a learning ecology.
A Family of Projects
The Expressive STEM Collective is a family of interlocking projects, including Families Learning Together, a community-centered, informal STEM learning project, and several separate but related research projects.
All of our work is guided by 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?
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.
Exploring Early Childhood Teachers’ Abilities to Identify Computational Thinking Precursors (EPK-2)
EPK-2 was a 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 ESC still draws on. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation (Award #2006595).
Beautiful Books
Led by Lori Assaf in 2023, 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. Beautiful Books was a partnership with the San Marcos Consolidated Independent School District (SMCISD).
Summer Computing and Storymaking
In 2024 and 2025, building on EPK-2 and Beautiful Books, Summer Computing and Storymaking was led by Sean Justice and Lori Assaf. Through a collaborative co-design model, early elementary teachers facilitated children’s computational storytelling with ScratchJr, KIBO robotics, and makerspace materials, noticing and naming the technical and creative decisions children made as they built, coded, and dramatized their stories. Sponsored by the LBJ Institute for STEM Education and Research.
Material Inquiry
Material Inquiry, developed in 2013 by Sean Justice, Marta Cabral, and Andrea Kantrowitz, is at the core of the ESC’s approach to research and learning. Broadly speaking, Material Inquiry is a way of thinking about tools and materials as active partners in learning rather than as passive instruments, a dispositional mindset that 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. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation (Award #2517055).