In the increasingly diverse educational context in contemporary societies, many teachers are teaching students with a different social and cultural background than their own. For those teachers it’s a challenge to tailor their lessons on the out of school knowledge and skills, including the home languages, of all students. For students, this can lead to a sense of discontinuity between school and the out of school environment in which they grow up, and thus a reduced involvement in school. A response to a deficit approach is an teacher attitude that assumes that all children are competent and have gained valuable knowledge and skills through life experience outside of school that can be used in school. From this attitude, in and out of school learning experiences can be linked, thus reducing the sense of discontinuity. Ways for teachers to do this is making use of funds of knowledge approaches and multilingual pedagogies.

This dissertation investigates how the use of meaningful learning experiences including students’ home languages can be put into practice in primary education and what the cognitive and socio-affective benefits are. The research consist of three research projects in which researchers collaborate closely with school boards and teachers from primary education from the Educational Research Lab Amsterdam.

The research projects are funded by NRO, Porticus and Amsterdams Universiteitsfonds