Supporting childcare professionals in approaching multilingualism: insights from a collaborative process for professional development

ABSTRACT

Although childcare professionals play a crucial role in creating stimulating environments for multilingual infants and toddlers and in establishing partnerships with multilingual parents, they often feel uncertain and inexperienced about it. This is especially true in multilingual contexts where three or more home languages in a single family are not uncommon, as is the case in Flanders (Belgium). To foster reflection among childcare professionals on early multilingualism, expand their knowledge base and support their practices towards multilingual children and families, a co-constructive process was set up with 29 tutors. These tutors joined forces to develop and test a toolkit to support continuous professional development trajectories of childcare professionals working with multilingual infants, toddlers and their parents. The present article draws on the experiences of the tutors in each phase of the collaborative design process of the toolkit, documented through meeting reports, field notes and semi-structured interviews. Findings are discussed based on five themes that emerged from the data analysis: breaking the silence about multilingualism, offering an array of possibilities for professional development, expanding the knowledge base of childcare professionals, valorizing the role of the tutor, and highlighting the role of innovative and collaborative projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingualism
• childcare
• continuous professional development
• design-based research
• tutor

Acknowledgments

This article analyses data from the ‘PRO-M’ project (2018-2022). This project was conducted in the Flemish Community of Belgium, in close collaboration between the universities of Leuven (KU Leuven), Ghent (Ghent University) and Brussels (VUB) and three valorization partners: Iedereen Leest, the governmental Agency Opgroeien, and VBJK. We are grateful for all the support we received from the project team. We would also like to thank the 29 tutors of the development group as well as all the childcare professionals who took part in designing and testing the toolkit.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [S006518N].