Addressing the complex, integrated learning needs of students within current, transdisciplinary, real world contexts requires pedagogical approaches that transcend disciplinary boundaries. In this study, we develop and empirically test a novel theoretical Transdisciplinary Epistemic Practices (TEPs) framework for STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) learning in higher education contexts. Grounded in socio-cultural perspectives on knowledge, epistemic practices are defined as discipline-specific ways of knowing and doing shaped by the dominant communities of practice, such as physicists in physics or digital artists in new media. Our TEP framework identifies and operationalizes eight TEPs, organized into three broad categories: exploring, meaning making, and critiquing. This project represents the first effort to define and apply such a framework within a higher education context. Methodologically, we employed a Delphi process within a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) composed of transdisciplinary teaching faculty who iteratively refined the framework based on pedagogical expertise and practice. We demonstrate the TEP framework’s utility through two in-depth case studies, each illustrating the use of a specific TEP in authentic instructional settings. Beyond informing course learning outcomes and assessment design, this work contributes to theory through providing a method for further developing integrated learning frameworks at the same or other disciplinary intersections.

Who gets to decide how generative AI tools enter students' classrooms? We report on a five-week participatory design program in which three 11th-grade Latinx students and three high school teachers in California negotiated how generative AI tools would be used and taught about in learning environments. Drawing on video recordings and designed artifacts, we ask: what critical AI literacy practices emerged as students and teachers jointly designed how generative AI tools would be used and taught about? Our analysis reveals three practices: collectively unsettling assumptions about AI, mutual learning through complementary expertise, and grounding AI critique in cultural knowledge and creative practice. Students and teachers developed these practices through the design work itself. This case contributes strategies for designing with youth around an emergent technology like generative AI toward critical AI literacy. It extends work on youth as protagonists by showing how this approach enables students to shape both the adoption and the interrogation of these tools in their learning environments.

Real-time handwriting interactions between tutors and students —where tutors observe individual problem-solving processes, provide personalized annotations, and adapt explanations based on students’ work—are fundamental to effective STEM tutoring. However, scaling such personalized handwriting-based tutoring remains challenging—human tutors cannot be available to every student on demand, and current online platforms often fail to recreate equivalent learning experiences. As an initial step toward tackling this challenge, we present AmIWrite, an LLM-powered AI tutoring system for mathematical problem-solving that provides real-time co-speech handwriting interactions on tablet devices, instantiated here as a case study in linear algebra. We conducted a within-subjects study (N = 40) comparing AmIWrite to a text-based AI tutor on two linear algebra topics. Our case study demonstrates how a multimodal AI tutor can preserve the pedagogical benefits of handwriting-based math tutoring and offer a potential path toward more scalable one-on-one STEM tutoring.

As generative AI systems increasingly mediate learning, they are often treated as authoritative sources of knowledge. This perspective paper introduces community-based AI learning as a framework that repositions authority, grounding AI engagement in learners' lived and community-based epistemologies. Drawing from community-driven learning and constructionist traditions, we articulate three commitments: epistemic fine tuning, redistribution of authority, and situated discernment. Together, these processes localize critical AI literacy by calibrating trust, foregrounding community knowledge, and supporting collective judgment about when to design with, interrogate, or reject AI. We argue that equitable AI education requires negotiating authority through place, history, and social context.

Tables of outcomes from Creative Expression, Caring Relationships, and Career Pathways A Guide to Youth Outcomes in Community Arts Programs for arts administrators to reference as programs are designed.

The benefit of participating in Out-of-School Time (OST) arts programs has been widely documented in studies that often reflect impact over short timeframes. Youth arts organisations often bear extraordinary claims about the impact of programs, and the value they hold especially in the lives of those who face difficult social circumstances. This paper reports the findings of a systematic review examining the long-term impacts of participating in arts-based OST programs with a particular focus on the experiences of marginalized youth. It provides a nuanced account of the field from the viewpoint of various research disciplines and develops an understanding of how researchers and/or program evaluators approach the challenges of long-term data collection in the face of time and resource constraint. Our review provides an overview of the way arts participation is measured and the types of subjective impacts that emerge as a result. Consequently, we develop a more comprehensive understanding of what constitutes arts education and learning in contemporary life, and a record of the types of impacts that generate change from a long-term perspective.

New report identifies long-term benefits of youth participation in community arts programs, from well-being to future trajectories

This article examines how fiber crafting as a category of activity can develop mathematics learning and the conditions under which various fiber crafting traditions differentially cultivate mathematical understanding. Modifying the constructionist paradigm with relational materialist principles, this paper advances the notion of "materialized action," which describes the natural inquiry process that results through emergent patterns between learners and the materialized traces of their actions. This paper takes a qualitative approach, combining a design and intervention phase to look closely across a set of materials (i.e., three fiber crafts, knitting, crochet, and pleating) and engagement in a "powerful idea" (i.e., the role of unitizing in multiplicative proportional reasoning), as instantiated across three youth case studies, and as an illustration of how we can better understand micro-developmental learning processes. We identified three levels of unitizing that make up the larger idea of enacting proportional reasoning (PR) through materialized action, which build and catalyze toward one another and support emergent understanding of PR from the intra-action of the material and the learner. In their engagement with PR, youth employed different strategies based on personal choice, affordances of the materials, and practices of the crafting traditions. Materialized actions as a theoretical advancement has the potential to reformulate what counts as mathematics and can guide the design of mathematics learning that is embracing (rather than reducing) worldly concreteness in learning key domain ideas, with implications for the design of more equitable learning environments.

Despite the growing demand for experienced Internet of Things (IoT) professionals across industrial establishments, most secondary education institutions do not offer a curriculum to empower students' knowledge and skills in IoT. Enrichment programs and vocational workshops can be considered as potential solutions to equip students with necessary IoT-related skills and assist them in planning and making conscious career choices. Through this research, we aim to utilize the principles of Backward Design and constructionism in designing an IoT curriculum for enrichment programs for high school students, while incorporating electro-mechanical concepts from electronics, programming, connectivity, and design. The curriculum was used to teach IoT concepts to 28 high school students during two enrichment programs. It was found that students with hardly any prior knowledge in IoT could acquire the necessary skills to design and prototype IoT applications.

As generative AI becomes increasingly integrated into children's creative lives, designing responsible and meaningful tools for Child-AI co-creation is a growing concern in HCI and education. This paper presents a scoping review of 20 studies on Child-AI co-creation, analyzing the types of creative activities involved, the age groups studied, and the roles AI systems play. Based on this synthesis, we identify six key design considerations: protecting child data privacy, minimizing bias and hallucinations, fostering appropriate reliance on AI, balancing support and creative freedom, encouraging peer and family collaboration, and making AI's creative process understandable. This work contributes an initial framework to guide the design of child-centered and developmentally appropriate AI co-creation systems, and highlights directions for future research.

To address the shortage of a skilled workforce in the U.S. manufacturing industry, immersive Virtual Reality (VR)-based training solutions hold promising potential. To effectively utilize VR to meet workforce demands, it is important to understand the role of VR in manufacturing education. Therefore, we conduct a scoping review in the field. As a first step, we used a 5W1H (What, Where, Who, When, Why, How) formula as a problem-solving approach to define a comprehensive taxonomy that can consider the role of VR from all relevant possibilities. Our taxonomy categorizes VR applications across three key aspects: (1) Domains, (2) Levels, and (3) Entities. Using a systematic literature search and analysis, we reviewed 108 research articles to find the current state, benefits, challenges, and future opportunities of VR in the field. It was found that VR has been explored in a variety of areas and provides numerous benefits to learners. Despite these benefits, its adoption in manufacturing education is limited. This review discusses the identified barriers and provides actionable insights to address them. These insights can enable the widespread usage of immersive technology to nurture and develop a workforce equipped with the skills required to excel in the evolving landscape of manufacturing.