Welcome to the STEAM Language, Learning, and Identity Research Lab

Our lab investigates how students' gendered, cultural, linguistic, and everyday repertoires of knowing serve as powerful resources for STEM learning and identity development. We understand identity statements (e.g., "I am not a math person," "I like science," "I am more artsy") not as expressions of internal traits but as everyday repertoires of competence and belonging: ways of knowing, reasoning, being, and problem-solving enacted through language, gesture, and embodied practice.

Our research studies show that when students' everyday racial, cultural, gender, and linguistic repertoires are at odds with dominant academic norms and expectations, they face marginalization that compounds over time, affecting their long-term STEM trajectories and identity development. This is especially the case for students from groups historically underserved and underrepresented in STEM fields, including girls and racial/ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomically minoritized communities. Our empirical contributions focus on studying the characteristics of designing spaces that allow us to

1. make visible these repertoires of competence, and

2. deploy them toward robust learning and transformation of STEM to be more human and innovative.

Specifically, we study the learning and teaching of disciplinary ideas and practices, including:

• Science and engineering sensemaking

• Concepts of thermodynamics, energy, ecosystem dynamics and interactions, and sustainability

• Computational and systems thinking

Our findings indicate that the asset-based STEM learning environments we designed and studied (Kayumova, 2022) were characterized by three interrelated features.

1. Learning was organized around transdisciplinary science inquiries anchored in complex, personally meaningful problems connected to students' families, communities, and environmental contexts.

2. These environments positioned youth as epistemic agents, supporting them in leveraging their full communicative and embodied repertoires—including translanguaging, culturally grounded problem-solving practices, and everyday ways of knowing—to engage in systems thinking.

3. Students were provided with sustained opportunities to use science, engineering, mathematics, and technology as tools for sensemaking, developing disciplinary knowledge, and addressing authentic problems.

Our research directly informs STEM learning, innovation design, and teacher education by providing empirically grounded frameworks, practices, and findings for creating asset-based, robust learning environments across formal, informal, and sociotechnical contexts. By documenting how students' everyday, gendered, and cultural ways of knowing function as resources for sophisticated STEM engagement, our work challenges deficit ideologies and advances both research and practice toward more just and dignified STEM education.