Martine van der Pluijm, researcher and lecturer at Rotterdam  University of Applied Sciences (Netherlands)

The parental role in supporting young children’s oral language development at home is crucial for children’s language and literacy development. However, there is limited expertise in how teachers can support lower-educated parents effectively to enhance their interactions with their children and stimulate the use of language. Therefore, teachers need specific knowledge and training in how to establish partnerships with these parents and provide support adapted to the home language environment. This dissertation explores how teachers can establish collaborations with lower-educated parents in support of child language development in co-creation with teachers and parents. It investigates the outcomes from two perspectives. From the perspective of teachers, we evaluated their abilities to adhere to the program principles and to adapt these to parents’ needs. From the perspective of parents we evaluated their perceptions, their number of activities at home with their child and the development of the parent-child interactions during activities. Both perspectives were investigated before and after implementation of the program. This study shows how teachers can increase their competences to work with parents and how this change contributes to professional satisfaction. It also shows positive perceptions of parents, an increase of the quality and quantity of the parent-child interaction and the number of language activities at home conducted by the lowest educated parents. It contributes to understanding how an adaptive approach creates opportunities for teachers to extend their roles in classrooms and build partnerships with all parents, bridging the gap between lower-educated families and schools as the two most important domains where young children acquire language.

Video: https://youtu.be/tj_XQLC5cBo

Link to Thesis

Presentation 2: Project: Welcome in the classroom: at home in lauguages

Els Plessers, professional development coordinator CBE Brusselleer  (Belgium)

The study of Martine van der Pluijm is started in Brussel and Brussel is searching for new partners to collaborate. The ‘Welcome in the Classroom’-project

– Rotterdam and Brussels- want to collaborate more in a new, extended

Partnership (Erasmus + project). We are looking for organizations working in a similar (metropolitan) context to exchange practices:

– Working together on parent involvement, with the aim of

– supporting low-literacy parents to stimulate the language development

of their children

– training (future) teachers in building partnerships with low-literacy parents

During the digital conference April 23 Martine and Els Plesser sent out an invitation for partnership. Read more here:

Categories: 2021 Digital conference, Conferences, Invitations, Urban Education