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Protecting US Native Languages
US natives are invited to join
Kidlink's
Who-Am-I? educational program in their languages. Out
of 176 living languages listed, most are endangered, and spoken by less than
2 million American Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts. The list includes famous
names like Apache, Blackfoot, Cherokee, Comanche, Cree, Inuktitut, Mohawk,
and Navaho. Jointly with
Canku Ota (Many Paths),
Kidlink proposes its eight-month, multilingual
Who-Am-I? as a vehicle to protect United States' indigenous
heritage. Key is the program's record
of motivating children and youth to read and write in their own language.
"To indigenous
communities, it is a means to increase their youth's knowledge and appreciation
of their area, people, language, culture, the way the society works,
history," says Odd de Presno,
Kidlink's executive director. "It is also a means
to communicate their culture to outsiders using their students as agents,
supported by teachers."
Kidlink is a non-profit grassroots organization providing
free educational services to children and youth through the secondary school.
Our work is supported by 79 public mailing lists for conferencing, a private
network for Real-Time Interactions (like chats), an online art exhibition
site, and some 500 volunteers living throughout the world. Most volunteers
are teachers and parents. Since the start 10 years ago, over 175,000 kids
from 137 countries on all continents have participated in our activities.
Who-Am-I? challenges students to collect and document
elements of the communities' culture that may be about to get lost. Their
works may be used as learning material in each community's language. Currently,
the program runs in parallel in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian,
Chinese, Danish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, and Saami. Romanian
and Catalan are scheduled to be added soon. To teachers, it is
a means to classroom instruction within writing, research, social studies,
history, geography, foreign languages, economics, mathematics, science, the
arts, current awareness, as well as personal development, Internet networking
skills, information and communications technology skills. When students have
a purpose (to get friends) and an audience, they want to read and write.
They demand knowledge to realize their purpose. Thus, it gives otherwise
"boring" classroom tasks meaning for students.
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