Welcome!
We’re glad you’ve made it to the Multi-STEM Toolbox for multilingual math and science learning.
Multi-STEM is a collaborative research project involving Utrecht University, HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, and iPabo University of Applied Sciences. It aims to promote the inclusion and participation of multilingual children in STEM education.
Children with a migrant background often experience barriers—in the Dutch classroom, and Dutch society at large. Their knowledge is spread across multiple languages, with their home language(s) often going unused or unnoticed. This may hinder their participation and learning. It can also make it difficult for them to reach their potential and share their knowledge. Children of migrant backgrounds are less likely to study and work in STEM subjects than native monolingual children.
There is evidence that the inclusion and embracing of home languages could help children with migrant backgrounds to participate and thrive in STEM subjects. Translanguaging is a multilingual approach in which children are encouraged to use all of their languages across learning settings.
The Multi-STEM team has worked with various stakeholders to design a toolbox of translanguaging strategies that can be used in:
In this toolbox, you will find tools and activities to help support multilingual children as they learn and grow, whether you are a teacher, caregiver, or a museum educator.
How to use this toolbox
This toolbox contains multilingual tools to be used in three contexts: schools, museums, and at home.
The toolbox was developed by the Multi-STEM team, based on our design and research on multilingual strategies (2021-2024). We have also included links to additional multilingual tools from existing literature.
The multilingual tools are divided into three contexts (school, museums and home). However, you will see that most of the tools can be easily adapted from one context to another. For example, if you are a teacher, we recommend that you begin by exploring the tools in the tab ‘schools’. If you are curious, you can also look at the tools for ‘home’ or ‘museum’, as they may also prove useful in your work with caregivers, or on out-of-school excursions.
The toolbox is meant to inspire you to make small steps towards richer multilingual math and science teaching and learning. Be aware that not everything needs to be implemented at once.
[The jargon used throughout the toolbox will be made into a link which directs to a definition. This way, the text will remain easy to read, and definitions will be easy to navigate. A list of definitions is added at the below ‘resources‘.]
