Multi-STEM is a research project that aims to promote the participation of multilingual children in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.
Subprojects
Children with a migration background can encounter obstacles in Dutch education.
Developing multilingual strategies for STEM education
Multi-STEM wants to ensure that multilingual children feel seen and heard, and that they can fully participate in education.
Multilingual children possess knowledge and skills in their home language that are lost in a monolingual Dutch environment.
That’s why Multi-STEM is developing an approach where both Dutch and home languages can be used.
Allowing a child to use all of their languages not only improves school performance, but also ensures that the child feels seen and involved.
Recent Blog Posts
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Using languages through technology
How do you access knowledge in the home language, when a student is the only one in the group with their home language? Digital tools provide promising opportunities.
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Co-designing a multilingual math activity with a caregiver of a multilingual child
At Multi-STEM, we’ve learned a lot about how to form, maintain, and nourish research practice partnerships with parents/caregivers of multilingual children. These learnings have been some of the most valuable learnings from Project: home (see: https://multistem.net/subprojects/home/). One of our most productive collaborations was with a mother of a multilingual child. Researcher Erin Gail MacDonald and…
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Maintaining home languages in the Netherlands – what do children think?
Caregivers often make efforts for children to maintain their home languages – and adults have a lot of reasons for doing that! But what do children think about it? We talked to children about their motivations, challenges and opportunities when maintaining their home languages and here we present some of our key findings.
