Handleiding voor leraren-opleiders

Deze handleiding die zowel door lerarenopleiders als leerkrachten in Suriname, Nederland en Vlaanderen gebruikt kan worden, geeft theoretische achtergronden en praktische toepassingen bij het voorbereiden van toekomstige leerkrachten op een cultureel diverse en meertalige klas.

De handleiding bestaat uit vier losse modules die gratis gedownload kunnen worden. De modules kunnen afzonderlijk of als één geheel in een cursus worden gebruikt. Continue Reading

Great news from the city that never sleeps! Nobody will deny that New York is a great example of America’s richness in cultural and linguistic diversity. This diversity is reflected in the city’s school system, as it continues its multilingual makeover by expanding the number of bilingual programs. In September 2016, 29 Dual Language Programs in Spanish, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, Arabic, Polish will be launched at schools in New York. Over the past years, the number of bilingual programs have been steadily increasing, bringing the total now to 180 different programs.

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|Lees Christella’s verhaal in het Nederlands|

It is late afternoon. A sharp April wind cuts into my face. As I get off the tram, I see a middle-aged woman approaching me. A while later, lost at the Oostende coast, I would ask the same woman the way. The woman stopped, like she was trying to imagine all the different scenarios that could have possibly led to this moment. She looks at me inquisitively, and asks: “Are you from Surinam or something?”

Ok, I had not expected this.

Following up on her question she added: “Because your Dutch is so good!” Continue Reading

|Lees Suheyla’s verhaal in het Nederlands|

My father decided not to teach me and my brothers the Turkish language, because that would diminish our chance at a good education, or so he believed. Our school told my parents that, if we would learn the Dutch language only, we would become good students: a language deficiency must be prevented.

Regardless of the tireless efforts of my parents, my younger brother still ended up needing the help of a speech therapist. He could not pronounce the letter ‘r’ correctly. This is not very strange, as in Eindhoven the rolling ‘r’ is an unusual sound. Little did my parents know that learning two languages could have actually contributed to the language proficiency of me and my brothers.
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Language discrimination is often invisible to most people. I never really thought about it, until I read something about the language barrier in academic literature on international relations by Ole Weaver. He criticised this discipline because almost all theories, books and ideas on international relations that are considered relevant were (and still are) produced by white, American and European men.

After reading this, I felt a little uncomfortable and I had to read it again. I looked through my old textbooks and articles that I had to read for my other IR classes and it was incredible: how could I not have noticed the fact that they were all written by the same kind of person? How could I not have second-guessed the theories but always considered them to be ‘fact’? I thought I was a critical student, but this was apparently not the case.

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