STEM Education Needs STEM Talk: Lessons learned from an after-school enrichment program with multilingual children

Multilingual children learning English often receive inequitable curriculum, instruction, and assessment opportunities in preK–5 schools where English is the dominant language of instruction (García and Kleifgen 2018). There is an even more prevalent gap when also considering access to high quality STEM learning opportunities (NASEM 2018). Why is STEM enrichment for multilingual children critical, even during a pandemic? STEM in early/elementary education can offer deep, productive content to engage all children and build on their lived experiences (Lee 2005). This is possible because it utilizes children’s innate curiosity about the world and fosters asking authentic questions about their community and local phenomena. When STEM teaching and curriculum is English-dominant without attention to the particular linguistic requirements expected, this opportunity presents a challenge for multilingual children, who may not know the content-specific academic language required (Lee, Quinn, and Valdés 2013). Through after-school enrichment where multilingual children can make their thinking visible by using multimodalities (e.g., gestures, visually sharing with detachable web camera) and with multilingual language scaffolding, more equitable STEM learning opportunities are possible. In this article, we share an example from a STEM investigation in an after-school program and provide recommendations for classrooms based on what we learned.