Indigenous Language Courses to Expand at Schools Across the Country

As part of U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona’s campaign to improve academic success and student well-being, the Department of Education has announced that over $11 million in grants will be allocated to create and enhance Native American language courses in schools. The funds will primarily be used to recruit bilingual and multilingual educators and provide high-quality programming to strengthen and revitalize Native American languages.

“Being multilingual is a superpower,” Cardona said of the new program, “a powerful asset that can connect students to their identity and culture and gives those who speak more than one language, cognitive, social and economic benefits.”

Funding for the program will be dedicated to two major sectors, with $7.5 million of the funds going to the National Professional Development (NPD) program, which works to better educational opportunities for those learning English. The program currently serves 94 entities throughout the nation, many of which support learning institutions for students of low-income backgrounds and underfunded areas. The Department projects that these grantees will serve approximately 3,700 participants across nine states in four languages: Navajo, Sm’algyax, Spanish and Ute.

Universities and other learning institutions benefiting from this portion of the funds are:

• Alder Graduate School of Education (California)
• Cal Poly Corporation (California)
• The Regents of the University of California, Santa Barbara
• Fort Lewis College (Colorado)
• University of Colorado Denver
• Gwinnett County Public Schools (Georgia)
• Kennesaw State University Research and Service Foundation (Georgia)
• University of Massachusetts Lowell
• Dual Language Education of New Mexico
• Chemeketa Community College (Oregon)
• The University of Memphis (Tennessee)
• Texas A&M University-Commerce
• Washington State University

The remaining funds, about $3.7 million, will go to the Native American Language (NAL@ED) projects to develop programs for Native languages. There are currently over 200 tribal communities without living speakers making this critical funding even more important for revitalizing Native American languages. In 2020, the Oneida Immersion School received a NAL@ED award to serve 434 elementary students as part of their Language Nest Expansion Project (LNEP).

The 12 NAL@ED grants will serve students across seven states. Projects will support language revitalization in Lakota, Tlingit, Numu, Cherokee, Yup’ik, Maskoke Seminole, Diné Bizaad (central, western and eastern dialects), Unangam Tunuu, Northern Paiute and Western Shoshoni. Grantees will engage in a number of projects for Native language revitalization, including developing proficiency benchmarks and hosting virtual cultural language summits and summer immersion institutes.

Projects that will be partaking in this funding are:

• Aleut Community of St. Paul Island Tribal Government (Alaska)
• Anchorage School District (Alaska)
• Douglas Indian Association (Alaska)
• The STAR School (Arizona)
• Dzilth-Na-O-Dith-Hle Community School (New Mexico)
• Navajo Preparatory School (New Mexico)
• Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation (Nevada)
• Washoe County School District (Nevada)
• Cherokee Nation (Oklahoma)
• Epic Charter Schools (Oklahoma)
• Wounded Knee District School (South Dakota)
• Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Schools (Wisconsin)

“The investments we’re announcing…advance our goal of providing every student in America with a pathway to multilingualism by supporting the recruitment, preparation and retention of amazing bilingual and multilingual educators,” Cardona additionally stated of the funds. “They also support the revitalization of Native American languages, a reflection of this Administration’s commitment to Tribal sovereignty and consultation in education.”

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This article was originally published on diversitycomm.net.