Schools throughout the globe are experiencing a growing number of pupils with a linguistic and culturally diverse background, leading to the emergence of new pedagogical challenges. These have highlighted both newly qualified and experienced teachers’ lack of knowledge and skills for dealing with this ever-increasing diversity (Robinson-Jones et al., 2022). Given this importance of minority- or migrant-induced multilingualism in schools for pupils’ language and content learning (Duarte 2018; Yuzlu & Dikilitas 2021), it becomes imperative to gain deeper insights into how researchers and practitioners can work together to co-develop, implement and assess multilingual approaches in European education. Researcher-practitioner collaboration may be at the heart of successful implementation of multilingual approaches, but it often still remains the last frontier (Jaffe, 2012). In addition, more knowledge is needed in what works in successful collaborative research focussing on multilingual approaches. The presentation will first reflect on a collaborative project involving 20 Dutch primary schools participating in an educational design research program aimed at stimulating the use of multiple languages through a holistic approach (Duarte & Günther-van der Meij, 2018). Researcher-practitioner collaboration will be highlighted as the main element guaranteeing sustainability of the co-developed approaches. Next, the presentation will present a second project focussing on developing and implementing multilingual ‘reading conversations’ (Prenger & Zaat, 2016) to improve reading motivation and reading proficiency of multilingual pupils in primary education in the Netherlands and Australia. The conditions for sustainable researcher-practitioner collaborations will be delineated.

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