The Big Ten Less Commonly Taught and Indigenous Languages Partnership strives to create sustainable, shared models for language instruction across institutions. This presentation focuses on the ways this partnership promotes models of inter-institutional collaboration and pedagogical innovation by developing proficiency-based teaching materials in a range of modalities in several targeted languages.
The Less Commonly Taught and Indigenous Languages (LCTL) Partnership is a multi-year project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that focuses on the collaborative development of models of LCTL instruction across multiple universities to improve the language proficiency of advanced learners of LCTLs. Declining enrollment at higher levels of proficiency is typical of all LCTL programs, making it virtually impossible for any one institution to have consistent LCTL offerings at all levels. The LCTL Partnership focuses on establishing strategic collaboration across a variety of LCTLs, and creating models for proficiency-oriented instruction and assessment so that more advanced students, across more institutions, achieve at least intermediate high proficiency in more LCTLs. Building on the longstanding and successful CourseShare initiative within the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), in which students from across the BTAA use videoconferencing technology to synchronously attend language courses on other campuses, the LCTL Partnership has explored collaborative models of LCTL instruction. Instructors of three languages (Swahili, Hindi, and Hebrew) have been working together to develop hybrid models of LCTL instruction. Course materials in different modalities (face-to-face, hybrid, synchronous and asynchronous online) have been developed through a 'working groups' model, in which the instructors from multiple Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions collaborate to develop curricula supported by innovative pedagogies. In creating these working groups, the LCTL Partnership pools relevant expertise and experiences across universities to create an intentional community of practice that will enrich language programs and sustain collaboration. In addition to working with instructors, the Partnership aims to develop a long-term, sustainable strategic coordination of LCTL offerings across institutions. This paper will reflect on the practical, institutional, and pedagogical challenges that we encountered in shaping the Partnership and the ways we have advanced our project, emphasizing the intended strategic cooperation between the Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions.
