PhD student: Brecht Peleman
Summary: While a growing number of studies point out the opportunities that come with multilingualism, many language minority parents feel distressed about linguistic issues in the education of the child. For professionals working in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), the growing linguistic diversity is challenging, as they often lack knowledge and experience on how to positively support multilingualism. Indeed, the educational field in general and ECEC in particular still implicitly favours homogeneity and tends to consider diversity (including multilingualism) as a problem to overcome, rather than as a reality and a condition for learning. As preschool institutions are mostly monolingual, they often don’t provide support for minority languages. From a social pedagogical perspective, this doctoral research project set out to explore professional development of ECEC practitioners working in contexts of multilingualism and (linguistic) diversity.
PhD in Educational Sciences
Promoter(s): Michel Vandenbroeck, Piet Van Avermaet (Linguistics, Ghent University)
Periode of time: September 2018 - September 2022