Early Education and Development

Reimagining STEM Learning Through Family, Culture, and Community Partnerships: Perspectives Across Home, School, and Informal Learning Contexts

Research on early STEM learning has increasingly demonstrated that young children's engagement with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics does not begin or end at the classroom door. Children encounter STEM as they play, tell stories, solve everyday problems, engage with technology, explore their neighborhoods, participate in family routines, and make sense of the natural and designed worlds around them. These experiences unfold within learning ecologies that span homes, schools, museums, community organizations, digital spaces, and other informal settings. They are shaped by children's relationships, languages, cultural practices, identities, and communities.

Despite growing recognition of these multiple contexts, research and educational design often examine them as distinct settings. Studies may focus on STEM learning within the home, school, or an informal learning environment without examining how knowledge, practices, relationships, resources, and identities move across or connect these settings. Similarly, efforts to broaden participation in STEM have frequently focused on bringing children and families into institution-designed educational experiences. Such approaches can overlook the ways families and communities serve as knowledge holders, cultural resources, designers, and partners whose expertise can shape both what counts as STEM learning and how learning opportunities are designed.

This special issue, Reimagining STEM Learning Through Family, Culture, and Community Partnerships: Perspectives Across Home, School, and Informal Learning Contexts, seeks scholarship that moves beyond studying individual learning settings in isolation to examine the relationships, connections, and partnerships that constitute children's STEM learning ecologies. We are particularly interested in scholarship that investigates how experiences, knowledge, practices, identities, and resources travel across settings; how families, educators, and community partners collaboratively create or strengthen connections among learning environments; and how these connections can support children's STEM learning and development.

Manuscripts might examine, for example, how children's STEM experiences at home connect with school learning; how community organizations and schools co-design learning opportunities with families; how cultural and linguistic practices move across learning settings; how informal STEM experiences shape children's participation or identities in formal educational environments; or how technologies, programs, and partnerships intentionally bridge multiple settings. Studies centered primarily within one context may also contribute when they explicitly demonstrate how that context is situated within, connects to, or has implications for the broader STEM learning ecology.

The special issue welcomes empirical and theoretical manuscripts, as well as review articles, that advance the understanding of these learning ecologies. Consistent with Early Education and Development's translational focus, submissions should articulate how their findings or arguments inform educational practice, program or learning-environment design, family and community partnerships, or efforts to strengthen connections across systems supporting young children's STEM learning. Collectively, the special issue seeks to advance an ecological, relational, and strengths-based understanding of early STEM learning. Rather than asking only how families and communities can support existing STEM educational systems, the collection asks how STEM learning itself might be reimagined when families, cultures, communities, and the relationships among learning settings become central to educational research and design.