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Elevating Latine Families Through Co-Design to Support Early STEM Education

Wed, April 8, 11:45am to 1:15pm PDT (11:45am to 1:15pm PDT), JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. LIVE, Floor: 3rd Floor, Georgia I

Abstract

Educators who build strong relationships with families and understand children’s home lives can better connect classroom learning to students’ prior knowledge. Latine families bring rich cultural and practical assets—known as Funds of Knowledge (FoK; Moll et al., 1992)—that can ground a strengths-based approach to early science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Culturally inclusive engagement becomes possible when teachers are equipped to integrate home-based practices into the curriculum, creating learning experiences that reflect Latine families’ FoK and positioning them as contributors to educational design (McWayne et al., 2021; Melzi et al., 2019).
Recent research highlights the value of co-design approaches that surface cultural strengths and FoK to foster more equitable early learning for Latine children (Anderson-Coto et al., 2024; Belgrave et al., 2022; Bermudez et al., 2024b). Co-design that engages families as partners in developing programs helps create empowering models by employing family expertise, reducing barriers, and fostering sustained participation (Booker & Goldman, 2016; Morris et al., 2019; Westerlund et al., 2003). This study defines STEM based on the California Preschool Science Domain (Figure 1; CDE, 2023).
This study asks:
How can co-design center families’ FoK to support more equitable, culturally inclusive engagement and collaboration in early STEM education?
In what ways do Latine families’ FoK in early STEM learning emerge during co-design and take shape through educational tools and activities?
The study took place in a research-practice partnership with 10 Latine families and 23 preschool teachers in a large Title I district in Southern California. In the 2024–25 school year, the research team and a community partner facilitated 12 two-hour co-design sessions. Sessions focused on developing strategies to integrate home knowledge into classroom STEM learning. Sessions were audio-recorded and transcribed.
Using Dedoose, the first author conducted an inductive, systematic thematic analysis (Saldaña, 2016; Naeem et al., 2023). For a larger study, first-round coding generated eight analytic codes (Table 1; Naeem et al., 2023) that led to five themes (Figure 2; Naeem et al., 2023). These themes are organized under three concepts: Infrastructure for Family Engagement, Building Home-to-School Capacity, and Classroom-Level Implementation, forming a conceptual Family Empowerment Model (Figure 3).
This study focuses on the component—Classroom-Level Implementation—and examines how educators enacted the analytic codes Home-based STEM Learning and Cultural and Linguistic Assets to leverage families’ FoK in practice. Findings show that implementation was strengthened when Latine families co-designed STEM tools and activities alongside teachers. For example, a co-created plant worksheet increased parent participation by using community-relevant prompts (Figure 4a). In another case, a mother—empowered by co-design—shared her experience with teachers about raising a cow, sparking a classroom investigation (Figure 4b) and inspiring a culturally-grounded worksheet. Later adopted by other teachers, this worksheet supported STEM activities—such as a footprint investigation—that surfaced and drew on families’ FoK (Figure 4c). These findings build on research positioning Latine families as co-designers as a strategy for equitable early STEM education (Bermudez et al., 2024a) and challenges traditional models of involvement by framing family engagement as families’ FoK flowing into the classroom (McWayne et al., 2020).

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