How multilingual children participate in science museums
For the subproject science museums, we interviewed families and museum educators at NEMO, Museon-Omniversum, and Teylers about their experiences – and how language plays a role.
One of the conclusions from this preliminary study is that language is vital when multilingual children and their families want to understand the subject matter. Especially at science museums, you can experience and do so much but if you want to get a more in-depth understanding you need language. Here we found that museum texts are often experienced as too long and abstract.
Another finding is that multilingual families often don’t feel comfortable speaking their home languages at the museum. This begs the question, are there implicit language norms? Is this something that we can influence or change?
Click here to read the full NWA-route Jeugd interview with Lucía Chisari (PhD researcher, subproject ‘Science Museums’).
Unfortunately, this interview is only available in Dutch. To read it in another language we recommend using the translation tool DeepL.com
