Summary
The Less Commonly Taught and Indigenous Languages Partnership (“LCTL Partnership”), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, had a multi-pronged approach to its ultimate goal of creating more sustainable models for language instruction, emphasizing online collaboration and instruction. This has come in the form of collaborative material development for various LCTLs, in-person and online professional development opportunities for LCTL instructors, the formation of strategic interinstitutional collaborations, supporting Indigenous language projects, and forming relationships in the LCTL community to lay the groundwork for sustainable, coordinated efforts to support LCTLs. The materials that have been developed as a part of the LCTL and Indigenous Languages Partnership in previous years have been released as Open Educational Resources (OERs) so that everyone may benefit from the work of the grant. Some of the collaborative work has included creating fully online asynchronous courses offered through CourseShare, which has sparked conversations about strategic coordination of future LCTL instruction across the BTAA. This project brought together LCTL specialists to develop sustainable, transferable models for coordinated and shared language instruction, which was designed to provide the pedagogical flexibility needed to respond effectively to the context of teaching across a wide range of LCTLs. The groundwork laid during the LCTL and Indigenous Languages Partnership has helped to shape the conversation about the sustainability of LCTLs in higher education in the United States.
The grant was facilitated by the Center for Language Teaching Advancement (CeLTA) at Michigan State University on behalf of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (formerly the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, or CIC).
Find out more about the grant team here and read a list of our presentations and publications.
LCTL Partnership Cycle 2
In 2019, Michigan State University was awarded a $2.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for a four-year cycle from September 2019 to August 2023. The end of the grant was later extended to August 2025. This cycle of the LCTL Partnership supported further development in the research and teaching of LCTLs, with an emphasis on the Indigenous language Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), which is an Indigenous language spoken in the Michigan area and Great Lakes region.
During the first years of the second cycle, the LCTL Partnership continued to develop additional courses in Hebrew and Portuguese, while continuing to promote already-developed materials in Swahili and Hindi.
In this grant cycle, we proposed to carry out the following major activities:
- Develop and promote proficiency-based language courses.
- Promote and facilitate strategic coordination of LCTL instruction.
- Develop innovative online courses as open educational resources
- Promote the existing and new proficiency-based open educational resources (OER) across and beyond the Big Ten Academic Alliance.
- Promote Indigenous languages through participatory collaborative research, pedagogical models, and curricular work which places members of Indigenous language communities at the center as equal partners in the initiative.
- Acknowledge and support the existing networks and curriculum development of Indigenous language communities. All work with these communities will be guided by project values of equity, transparency, and community.
- Support professional development and network opportunities for LCTL and Indigenous language instructors.
- Create research opportunities for existing LCTLs and Indigenous language scholars and students.
Click to read a press release from the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State about this cycle of the grant.
LCTL Partnership Cycle 1
The first cycle of the grant ($1.2 million) ran from September 2016 through August 2019. In the first year of the project, the goal for development was to create hybrid/online modules targeting advanced students for one selected LCTL and to offer workshops that focus on professional development and the sharing of best practices. Swahili was chosen as the language of initial focus based on input from our partner institutions in the Big Ten Academic Alliance.
In the second year, the models created in the first year were used to begin development with a second LCTL, Hindi. Implementation and modification of the Swahili curriculum continued, as did professional development.
In the third and final year of the first cycle grant, the models of years one and two were implemented with a third LCTL, Hebrew.
| CYCLE 1 | Project Year 1 | Project Year 2 | Project Year 3 |
| Language 1 (Swahili) | X | X | |
| Language 2 (Hindi) | X | X | |
| Language 3 (Hebrew) | X |
Click to read a commentary from Europe Now about the project, entitled “From Collaboration to Strategic Coordination: Creating LCTL Partnerships Across the Big 10 Academic Alliance.”