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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

  • Maintaining home languages in the Netherlands – what do children think?

    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.

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  • Multilingualism and Children’s Book Week

    Multilingualism and Children’s Book Week

    Children’s Book Week is an opportunity to appreciate multilingualism, leverage the knowledge of parents, and promote reading books in any language.

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  • The value of a multilingual approach: a teacher’s perspective

    The value of a multilingual approach: a teacher’s perspective

    Teachers Violet and Bart have developed multilingual routines in their newcomers classroom. Working in and with languages that they do not speak themselves has been challenging, but also very successful in many ways. Over the two years that Violet worked with us, she answered the following question on various occasions: Could you tell us about…

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