UAF gets $1.3 million to help save Native languages (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

UAF gets $1.3 million to help save Native languages

IMMERSION PROGRAMS: Money will be used to recruit teachers with
Kuskokwim ties.

The Associated Press
(Published: November 17, 2006)
http://www.adn.com/news/education/story/8416935p-8311651c.html

FAIRBANKS -- University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers have been
awarded $1.3 million to help teachers in rural Alaska better serve
bilingual students and students in language immersion programs.

The U.S. Department of Education grant is the largest humanities grant
the College of Liberal Arts has ever received.

The money will be used over the next three years to help recruit,
educate and graduate about 20 master's students and four doctoral
students with ties to the Lower Kuskokwim Delta region of Alaska.

The program is geared toward individuals who are already teaching in the
region.

"Our goal is to create local leadership because the local people know
best what the local schools need," said project director Sabine
Siekmann.

Siekmann said the three-year project will focus on the Yupik language,
partly because the Lower Kuskokwim School District, based in Bethel,
already has a well-established immersion program.

In the future, however, her team would like to take the program
statewide.

The Lower Kuskokwim School District is one of the state's largest rural
districts. About 80 percent of the district's 3,800 students are Yupik,
and about a fourth of the district's 350 certified teachers are Yupik,
the largest percentage of indigenous educators of any district in
Alaska.

The district also has one of the only immersion schools in the state,
the Ayaprun Elitnaurvik Yupik Immersion Elementary School.

Students in the school spend much of their day speaking Yupik. They
learn math, social studies and other topics in the native language of
the region.

"If you value your language, the immersion programs are absolutely vital
to the sustenance of that language," said Bev Williams, director of
academic programs for the Lower Kuskokwim School District.

"English is bombarding the communities all the time through television,
through travel, through state testing. And, of course, schools have
been paramount in ridding communities of their language. We are trying
to change that approach."