Welcome to the ESC Research Collective.

The ESC Research Collective investigates how families, youth, and community members learn, make, and imagine together. We work with libraries, cultural centers, and university partners in San Marcos, Texas, to study how intergenerational learning generates imagination and creative confidence, a process we call “expressive STEM.”

• Everyone teaches — every participant brings knowledge worth sharing.
• Everyone learns — including us, as researchers.
• Everyone makes — through hands-on engagement with robotics, coding, circuits, and environmental science.

And everyone researches, too — because we build knowledge about ourselves, our families, and our communities, together. The ESC Research Collective invites families and community members to becomce co-investigators in the questions that matter to them.

The ESC Research Collective emerged from a community partnership with Families Learning Together (FLT), a learning network anchored at Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos and the San Marcos Public Library since 2017. As a research project, the Collective brings a formal research infrastructure, funded by the National Science Foundation (Award #2517055), to a community that has been exploring expressive STEM learning together for nearly a decade.