Understanding Why STEM Identity Matters Through Ecologies of (Dis)investment

1. Introduction

Why does it matter if more individuals, representing more diverse populations, identify themselves as a “STEM person”?

In psychological and sociological terms, “mattering” refers to the phenomenon of feeling valued and believing that one adds value to a community (Prilleltensky, 2020). Over the past 20 years, researchers and practitioners have increasingly embraced “STEM identity” as a highly valued outcome for STEM engagement programs, largely due to its predictive power for STEM career intentions (Jiang et al., 2025). In this traditional view, a person’s STEM identity “matters” primarily because of what they can contribute to their communities through participating in STEM careers, such as providing technological solutions to complex socioscientific issues (Hwang et al., 2023) and occupying careers that increase individual wealth and stability (Cian et al., 2022).

In proposing this Special Issue, I intended to interrogate this narrow, capitalistic conception of why STEM identity matters and offer a broader—if not alternative—way of imagining what can be realized through efforts to encourage these identities. I intentionally avoid referring to STEM identity as an intrinsic trait that an individual either “has” or “does not have.” Instead, this editorial adopts the view that everyone has a STEM identity, and the role of educational interventions is to scaffold individuals in understanding the qualities of their STEM identity. Aligning with Carlone and Mercier (2026), I imagine identity development as a process that can be provisional, experimental, and playful. In this way, this Special Issue explores the complex ecosystems that nurture STEM affinities—and the conditions that are intentionally constructed to keep those ecosystems vibrant and evolving. These nuanced conditions encourage identity-related outcomes that necessitate deeply grounded, long-term, and partnership-based investments across local and national communities.

To explore these complex dynamics, this Special Issue brings together nine submissions from authors in Greece, New Zealand, and the United States. Methodologically, most submissions utilize intervention case studies to illustrate how STEM identity-related outcomes can be achieved in practice. Authors represent universities, nonprofit organizations, and consulting firms. A crucial throughline across these works is an emphasis on the often-overlooked contextual characteristics in which interventions take place. These include the political and funding landscapes, the inconsistent expectations within intersecting communities of what “counts” as doing STEM, and the relational foundations upon which successful interventions must be built.

Across these diverse submissions, I identified three overarching themes that help unpack the complexity of STEM identity, why it matters, and what specific conditions contribute to its recognition and encouragement. In discussing these themes in this editorial, I use the grammar of “(dis)investment” as a connective framework to illustrate the duality of investing and disinvesting as an opportunity cost. In zero-sum systems, decisions about where to invest efforts, money, or social capital require responsible decision-makers to identify and consider the consequences of not investing in alternatives. In this way, investment in one initiative requires removing or choosing not to pursue investment elsewhere. I organized my editorial using three themes: (a) the consequences of community (dis)investment; (b) recognizing and reporting downstream effects on individual (dis)investment; and (c) defining and considering the tradeoffs of (dis)investment.

2. Theme 1: The Consequences of Community (Dis)investment

Community (dis)investment in STEM education manifests through the complex interplay of political landscapes, funding structures, and relational foundations. Research-practice engagement approaches that employ co-design advance researchers towards power recognition, and even power balancing, which motivates communities’ emotional and cultural investment in these efforts (Penuel, 2019; Wardak et al., 2024). This relational foundation helps to secure the sustainability and success of STEM initiatives. In this way, involving relevant communities—and defining appropriately who those relevant communities are—has profound consequences for their ongoing (dis)investment throughout a STEM education effort.

Several papers in this Special Issue examine these dynamics across different institutional contexts, illustrating how the “community” that (dis)invests in STE(A)M(M) education is diverse and multi-faceted. Spyropoulou and colleagues’ contribution tabulates the role of diverse stakeholders in addressing barriers to effectively enacting STEAM education across Europe. Optimistically viewed, such an interconnected ecology can help education interventions sustain themselves through transition periods. This is further illustrated by Hughes and colleagues’ description of the crucial support from local and federal entities for their Girls in Science (GIS) program, as well as in Cian’s description of the braided funding that sustained and expanded the Afterschool Coaching for Reflective Educators in STEM (ACRES) program. However, macro-level dependencies also pose significant risks. As the GIS program illustrates, the retreat of a key funding partner can present an insurmountable challenge to the work’s survival. While their manuscript does not discuss the consequences of the program’s cancellation on future community buy-in, it is worth questioning what the outcomes of this kind of active disinvestment are on future efforts to engage the same community.

While the GIS and ACRES programs illustrate how major institutional funding sources can make these interventions possible—or impossible if they are missing—other submissions exemplify why localized, micro-level community (dis)investment matters just as much. Letorneau and colleagues’ description of the development of an engineering design exhibit highlights that attunement to learner experiences demands internal, localized investments. Such attunement requires an investment in staff training, an openness to revise thinking, and a willingness to pivot away from prior investments to respond to what actually works for learners. This localized pivot involves both material considerations and the opportunity cost of ceding professional judgment; for instance, shifting from “familiar” to “usable” materials during a design challenge requires recognizing that “knowable materials aren’t necessarily knowable when they’re out of context.”

Beyond internal staff and material investments, localized community investment also heavily relies on historical and relational capital. Kemp and colleagues acknowledge how the deep-rooted history of Bound Together’s partnerships significantly lowered the startup barriers for their specific program. This history of investment included pre-existing relationships with transportation providers and community members with expertise relevant to the medical program. However, making use of this available community wealth also required that their intervention was intentionally developed and defined to ensure that the community’s existing expertise was recognized, valued, and integrated from the very beginning.

3. Theme 2: Recognizing and Reporting Downstream Effects on Individual (Dis)investment

While STEM identity’s value is frequently framed around its contribution to career outcomes, relying solely on this metric represents a narrow scope of institutional investment. Research linking STEM identity to career intentions—such as enrollment in postsecondary programs—is robust, though variations in individuals and contexts affect the strength of these relationships (Jiang et al., 2025). However, defining the “return on investment” for STEM identity primarily in terms of immediate, individual career outcomes is both limiting and fraught. When educational systems and funders invest exclusively in these easily measurable endpoints, they inherently disinvest in recognizing the broader, long-term downstream effects that interventions have on an individual’s identity and community contributions.

Several papers in this Special Issue illustrate the disconnect between long-term individual development and the short-term investments of funding bodies. Jones and colleagues use retrospective surveys and interviews of in-service and preservice teachers to identify how participating in extracurricular informal programming influenced their pathways to teaching careers, finding that opportunities to act as facilitators had the strongest influence. This finding is particularly interesting to consider alongside the work of Sickler and colleagues on youth-led Teen Science Cafes. As Jones and colleagues suggest, participants in these programs may eventually view their experiences as formative to their careers in educational leadership. Yet, because these identity trajectories take years to materialize, they represent an outcome that cannot be accounted for in the short-term reporting baked into typical funding cycles. This structural disinvestment in long-term tracking limits our understanding of program impacts, even when participants themselves recognize the value; for instance, Hughes and colleagues found that GIS participants explicitly credited the program with their subsequent STEM career pursuits, interests, and attainment.

Beyond delayed career trajectories, manuscripts in this Special Issue also exemplify the ripple effects of redefining what we consider a “valuable” individual outcome. Ennes and colleagues demonstrate how participants in a STEM family program cultivated an awareness of their family science habitus and community cultural wealth. These outcomes manifested in downstream relational investments, such as engaging in STEM-related conversations with family and friends or choosing STEM-related gifts for other children in the family. Under traditional evaluation metrics, these subtle, playful shifts in identity might be ignored. However, utilizing tools like Cian’s Capacity-Based Cost Assessment (CBCA), these shifts are recognized as critical human capacity outcomes that are rarely considered when evaluating programs’ return on investment.

4. Theme 3: Defining and Considering the Tradeoffs of (Dis)investment

The basic principles of inertia dictate that, absent intervention, phenomena will continue their common course without deviation. In STEM education, this is particularly evident when programs define their primary goals around keeping pace with rapid technological innovations, such as Artificial Intelligence. However, such uncritically examined trajectories inherently carry significant opportunity costs. Investing heavily in dominant, tech-centric momentum often results in the adoption of educational tools that marginalize nondominant ways of learning and communicating (Costa et al., 2023; Litts et al., 2020). As Williams and colleagues discuss regarding their TechTahi platform in this Special Issue, a failure to undertake intentional investment in communities for whom technology platforms were not originally designed guarantees that these communities will be left out. This structural disinvestment resonates with the work of Litts et al. (2020), who expose how technology designs built for standard engagement are often incompatible with diverse narrative structures, implicitly erasing and devaluing those structures within technologically mediated worlds.

Beyond technological design, the tradeoffs of (dis)investment are also acutely felt in programmatic implementation, specifically regarding the tension between achieving deep impact versus reporting high reach numbers. Across the cases described in this Special Issue, the authors acknowledge that evaluating return on investment frequently forces a choice between these two metrics. In describing the professional learning model for their Teen Science Cafes, Sickler and colleagues explicitly call out the tension between an “efficient” process—one that enables the throughput of more trainees in an identical way—and a model that centers high-touch, personalized support for each learner. Sickler and colleagues note that “the ‘efficient’ systems had a higher potential to alienate trainees from the process and cause them to drop out.” Here, the authors highlight a crucial tradeoff between efficiency and efficacy, such that investing in high numbers and standardized reporting necessitates a disinvestment in the relational, personalized support required to sustain meaningful STEM identities.

Collectively, these papers challenge the prevailing “more is better” instinct by demonstrating that every programmatic decision acts as an opportunity cost. Whether allocating resources toward new technologies or prioritizing high trainee throughput, investing in dominant or “efficient” systems often requires a direct disinvestment in equity and relational capacity. Understanding and defining these tradeoffs is critical for stakeholders who wish to design the deeply grounded, long-term partnered investments necessary for authentic STEM identity realization.

5. Final Remarks

By addressing the tangible realities of community and individual (dis)investment, the contributions in this Special Issue provide fresh perspectives on the intricate nature of STEM identity growth. This collection disputes the conventional “more is better” perspective that frequently motivates STEM initiatives by critically analyzing the zero-sum premises embedded in educational policy, funding, and execution. Recognizing these zero-sum tensions—where prioritizing standardized efficiency or mainstream technologies often necessitates a withdrawal from personalized, relational support—offers a valuable conceptual framework for the field. Building on the manuscripts presented here, I suggest that articulating and weighing these tradeoffs enables practitioners, researchers, and policymakers to identify the constraints of a restrictive, capitalistic view of STEM participation. Although the “more is better” rhetoric suggests it can reconcile efficiency with personalization, the actual limits of fiscal, labor, and energetic capacities impose significant boundaries on such goals.

Ultimately, interrogating these tradeoffs frees the field to rethink why STEM identity truly “matters.” If “mattering” is defined as feeling valued and adding value to a community, then our educational investments must shift away from exclusively tracking short-term STEM career intentions or viewing individuals primarily as future producers of technological solutions. Instead, the interventions and contextual frameworks discussed across these submissions shed new light on how deeply grounded, partnership-based investments can scaffold individuals in understanding the unique qualities of their existing STEM identities. By moving away from the notion that STEM identity is an intrinsic trait one either “has” or “does not have,” educational programs can better support identity development as a provisional, experimental, and playful process. Acknowledging the ecology of (dis)investment will provide a vital foundation for fostering genuinely inclusive communities where diverse populations are valued for their holistic human capacity.