Partnerships

The CEDAR LRC strengthens community and institutional partnerships at both the K-12 and university levels to further increase access to high-quality language curricula. The Summer Language Institute provides professional development opportunities for K-16 educators on curriculum development, lesson planning, and communicative language teaching, building upon existing collaborations with K-12 school districts in the tristate region and beyond. The CEDAR LRC has also partnered with faculty from Union Institute and University, a local minority-serving institution, for the creation of an innovative open-access online curriculum for the teaching of Nahuatl.

Partnership: Union Institute and University Faculty

  • Description: Nahuatl is an Uto-Aztecan language with over 1.3 million speakers in Mexico (Olko & Sullivan, 2014) and various speech communities in southwestern areas of the U.S. Through a collaboration with Union Institute and University faculty, the “Developing Interactive Experiences for Nahuatl Language Learners” seeks to promote and preserve this less-commonly-taught language by creating curricular materials for teaching Nahuatl, based on authentic representations of the Nahuatl speaking community in southern Mexico and its diaspora in the United States. 
  • Project Director: Daniel Diaz Reyes, Ph.D., J.D.  
  • Current Phase (Year 2 of 4): Creation and compilation of authentic materials for Nahuatl instruction

Community Partnerships: K-16 Summer Language Institute

  • Description: The Summer Language Institute supports K-16 language practitioners seeking to employ contemporary, research-supported best practices for world language instruction in their classrooms. Specifically, the Summer Language Institute will focus on equipping pre- and in-service foreign/world language, heritage language, immersion, and ESL/EFL educators with training on how to both modify existing curricula and create new course materials that adhere to ACTFL World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages. The Summer Language Institute runs in person every summer for three days, hosted at the University of Cincinnati.
  • Project Director: Anne Lingwall Odio, Ph.D. 
  • Current Phase: Scheduling speakers and dates for the 2024 Summer Language Institute