Expressive STEM Centers in Central Texas: A Research Collective Learning to Empower Community Imagination and Creative Confidence

About This Grant

The Expressive STEM Centers (ESC) project creates family-driven learning networks that honor shared knowledge and experience while building confidence with technology and science. Located in San Marcos, Texas, this project transforms how informal STEM learning happens by positioning libraries and community centers as hubs for intergenerational innovation. Rather than treating STEM as separate from daily life, the ESC project uses a material inquiry approach where families explore robotics, coding, circuits, and environmental science by connecting powerful tools to heritage stories and real-world challenges. This project advances understanding of how imagination and creative confidence develop through hands-on learning, testing whether family-based STEM experiences can create lasting changes in how communities envision their futures. By demonstrating that meaningful STEM learning emerges when family communities control the design process and when materials become collaborative partners rather than passive tools, this research project provides a model for accessible STEM education that builds on family and community strengths and assets, supporting NSF's mission to advance both scientific knowledge and broaden participation in the scientific enterprise. The ESC Research Collective employs Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology integrated with material inquiry approaches to investigate how expressive STEM learning generates imagination and creative confidence across intergenerational family networks. Over three years, the project will conduct approximately 160 formal events (playshops, afterschool clubs, scientist roundtables, community science activities) plus 230 DIY drop-ins across three community sites: the San Marcos Public Library, Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos, and the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University. Using mixed-methods data collection including micro-interviews, video documentation, exit surveys, ethnographic field notes, and participant-curated digital portfolios, researchers will track how moments of imagination during material engagement propagate through families and communities over time. The research investigates three primary questions: (1) how intergenerational family-focused expressive STEM learning generates sustainable multimodal STEM literacies, (2) how emergent creative confidence disrupts conventional thinking about family and community capacities for learning, and (3) how engaging in community research affects belongingness for individuals and communities. Data analysis employs diffractive mapping, discourse analysis, AI-assisted pattern recognition, and collaborative interpretation between university and community co-researchers. Expected outcomes include evidence-based frameworks for community-driven STEM learning, a replicable catalog of expressive STEM engagements, participant micro-credentials documenting research and facilitation skills, and scholarly publications advancing understanding of imagination's role in informal STEM education. The project's collaborative infrastructure model, where community members become co-researchers while maintaining program autonomy, offers a scalable approach for expanding community-controlled STEM learning networks nationwide. This Integrating Research and Practice project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing everyone with multiple pathways for accessing and engaging in STEM learning experiences. The project is co-funded by the STEM Ed PRF Program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.