Family Contexts and STEM Identity Development in Childhood

Dear Colleagues,

Families are among the earliest, most enduring contexts in which children learn what counts as STEM, who engages in it, and how STEM-related pursuits align with the values and goals that organize everyday life. These contexts hold more potential than any other for nurturing and exploring long-lasting STEM identities while offering children the best opportunities to negotiate their intersection with other social identities. Yet, without a meaningful understanding of how familial interactions shape children’s dispositions toward STEM, we miss critical opportunities to amplify the effectiveness of both formal and informal STEM learning efforts.

This Special Issue invites scholarship that advances family-centered perspectives on children’s STEM-related development by situating identity formation within relational, sociocultural, and developmental systems. We welcome work that builds on influential intersectional STEM identity scholarship that has illuminated how race, gender, class, language, and other dimensions of social positioning shape experiences in STEM. We are particularly interested in research that engages sociopolitical critiques of workforce and pipeline discourses that have narrowed how STEM participation and success are defined, as we believe this conversation is underdeveloped in the context of family engagement. Together, the articles in this Special Issue will underscore the importance of examining how families interpret, negotiate, and sometimes reconfigure dominant STEM narratives in ways that reflect their broader commitments, constraints, and aspirations.

At the same time, this Special Issue does not presume STEM identity to be a necessary or universal outcome of STEM engagement. Many children engage meaningfully with STEM-related practices, reasoning, or problem-solving without aspiring toward conventional STEM careers or identity labels. Family environments may therefore function as spaces where children integrate STEM learning with other valued aspects of their lives, including their cultural, familial, religious, and personal priorities. We encourage submissions that acknowledge this complexity and, in doing so, enrich the understanding of what it means to design for STEM identity development.

In this Special Issue, we invite original, empirical research articles—qualitative, quantitative, or mixed—and reviews that attend to the aim described above, including the following areas, without being limited to them:

• Family-centered and family systems approaches to children’s STEM-related development;
• Caregiver–child interactions and the formation of STEM-related beliefs, values, and identities;
• Developmental perspectives on early STEM meaning-making, self-understanding, and identity formation;
• Intersectional analyses of family influence in children’s STEM learning and participation;
• Cultural, linguistic, religious, and value-based negotiations of STEM within family contexts;
• Sociopolitical critiques of STEM workforce, pipeline, and career discourses as they intersect with family life;
• Family mediation of formal and informal STEM learning experiences;
• Longitudinal, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches to studying family-mediated STEM development;
• Design implications for family-engaged STEM programs, curricula, and learning environments;
• Novel, innovative methods and methodological approaches to inclusive, respectful STEM identity research with caregivers.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Remy Dou
Dr. Heidi Cian
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• STEM identity
• family influence
• child development
• STEM learning
• family engagement
• intersectionality
• informal learning
• STEM careers
• sociocultural factors
• education equity