Award Winners for Volume 18
Language-Related Challenges and Recommendations of Migrant Families Visiting Dutch Science Museums
Science museums can be a rich learning context, where visitors engage with scientific practices with few formal requirements. However, science museums can be experienced as not welcoming to migrant families due to social, economic, and cultural barriers. In this study, we asked what language-related challenges migrant families experienced in Dutch science museums and what recommendations they had for linguistic inclusion. We interviewed twelve families of Turkish, Moroccan, or Syrian backgrounds after their visit to a Dutch science museum. We discovered that (1) first-generation families found the predominance of Dutch in the museum challenging, (2) the science language used in the museum brought on additional challenges, and (3) the families saw potential emotional benefits to the presence of their mother tongue in the museum, albeit expressing a need for Dutch to remain at the center of the linguistic landscape in the museum. These findings show that language plays a role in migrant families’ experiences in science museums. The findings invite science museums to engage in a dialogue with migrant communities about their needs when it comes to more inclusive museum experiences.
In our 2025 article “Language-Related Challenges and Recommendations of Migrant Families Visiting Dutch Science Museums”, we describe museum experiences of families with migrant and multilingual backgrounds in Dutch science museums. Among the findings is the conclusion that migrant families may find the predominance of a for them unfamiliar language in the museum challenging in different ways. They may not enjoy equal access to museum explanations or content or even feel ashamed to speak their own language during the visit. We also found that the science language in science museums brings additional challenges. Children may have acquired specific scientific terms through the language of the museum at school, while parents, who often take an explanatory role, know these terms only in their home language. This impacts the characteristics of the parent-child interactions at the museum: Parents and children may find it hard to talk about the museum content with each other, or give up sooner when engaging with the museum content.
Since the submission of the article, through the Multi-STEM project (https://multistem.net/), we continue learning about the role language plays in the museum participation of migrant children and families. In a follow-up study (Chisari et al., 2025), we show how multilingual families engage in translanguaging (i.e., using home languages and other semiotic resources) in the museum, by for example, translating for one another and combining languages and registers while speaking. In this and further research, we have found that when more languages are present in the museum, including families’ home languages, more opportunities exist for these families to interact around the museum content. For example, a parent and child may read the same text in different languages before discussing it. Multilingualism in the museum thus opens the way for families to connect with each other and the museum, and feel like they belong in the museum setting.
When considering how museums can become more inclusive of migrant children and families, we thus urge researchers and practitioners to consider the potential of making more languages present at the museum, and creating an environment where families’ use of their own multilingual repertoires is welcome and promoted.
—Lucía Chisari, Mirona Moraru, Arthur Bakker, Jantien Smit, and Elma Blom