Keynote Address

NSF AISL Meetings » 2026 Awardee Meeting » Program » Keynote Address

This page provides information about the 2026 AISL Awardee Meeting session: Keynote Address: Reframing Play, Design, and STEAM Futures: Makin’ STEAM Media as Relational Community Care which took place on February 25, 2026.

Keynote Address: Reframing Play, Design, and STEAM Futures: Makin’ STEAM Media as Relational Community Care

Speaker: Dr. Kareem Edouard

This keynote frames The ILLEST Lab as a living design praxis that extends into children’s media. In West Philadelphia, play, computational making, and storytelling function as culturally grounded practices that build homeplace. Grounded in Welcome Home: Positive Affective Cultural Experiences (Edouard, 2026, Science Education), I argue that STEAM media is more than content production. It is relational community care, using narrative as communal expression and learning.

Through the Animation Lab, Sneaker Lab, and the GRIND initiative, I center students of West Philly as designers, storytellers, and technologists. Their experiences sharpen the stakes of engagement in STEAM. Positive Affective Cultural Experiences (PACE) examines how collaborative creation reshapes learning environments and expands representation, identity, and possibility. That same design vision extends into my Children’s media work. As Executive Producer of MayNERD’s Wild World of Science and Built From Scratch, and Creative Producer on the PBS KIDS series Work It Out Wombats! I use the media as infrastructure for belonging. Across the lab and screen, the work remains the same: build ecosystems where presence, imagination, and technical skill grow together.
 
Edouard, K. (2026). Welcome home: Positive affective cultural experiences and the proleptic promise of belonging in informal STEM with Black boys. Science Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.70057

Storytelling

Speaker Bio

Dr. Kareem Edouard is an Assistant Professor of Learning Technologies at the School of Education at Drexel University and Director of The Informal Learning Linking Engineering Science & Technology (ILLEST) Lab. His research centers on computational making, creative play, and narrative storytelling, brought to life in his Black Male Animation Lab. This lab provides Black boys with the opportunity to tell their stories while honing computational skills, designing narrative tools, and building STEM competencies through culturally sustaining and equity-driven practices. His goal is to motivate Black students to pursue STEAM learning through culturally relevant informal STEM programs. Dr. Edouard is also currently a Creative Producer on the PBS KIDS show, Work It Out Wombats!, produced by GBH and Pipeline Studios. He is a former high school teacher who earned a Bachelor’s degree in Media Education from DePaul University, a Master’s degree in Teaching from the University of Southern California, and a Ph.D. in the Learning Sciences and Technology Design program at the Graduate School of Education from Stanford University.

Email: ke388@drexel.edu