One of the primary goals of IIK-CDRIL is to work collaboratively with Indigenous educational institutions to make the products of scientific research available to the communities with whom the research was conducted. Today the foremost concern of most communities is language shift and language revitalization and reclamation. To address that concern, IIK-CDRIL has worked for decades to develop language curricula and other materials that can support language instruction programs in elementary and secondary schools as well as in community colleges.
Past educational projects include:
- Arikara, a language spoken today on the Fort Berthold Reservation. Worked with the White Shield School, Roseglen, North Dakota, to develop a comprehensive set of materials in both printed and computer formats for teaching Arikara at the elementary and secondary levels.
- Assiniboine, a language spoken on the Fort Belknap and Fort Peck reservations in Montana and on the Carry The Kettle, White Bear, Pheasant's Rump, and Mosquito-Grizzly Bear's Head reserves in Saskatchewan. Worked with Fort Belknap College to develop materials in both printed and computer formats for teaching Assiniboine at the post-secondary level.
- Lakota, Red Cloud School, Pine Ridge, SD.
- Pawnee, a language spoken today in Pawnee, Oklahoma. Worked with the Pawnee Nation to develop materials in both printed and computer formats for teaching Pawnee in the local high school and in adult education classes.
One product of these educational efforts is the development of an innovative set of interactive multimedia language lessons for Arikara that supplement the traditional printed textbook. The computer lessons incorporate sound recordings of all language material. The format is significant because it incorporates native speech in sound-recorded form and ensures that native speaker pronunciation of instructional materials will always be available to students, even after there are no remaining elder speakers of the languages. Thus, this format enables students to study their language in the absence of native speaker teachers, not only in their communities but also anywhere in the United States or abroad.
The Arikara lesson format, moreover, serves as a model for other languages and was used to develop lessons for Assiniboine and Pawnee.
Multimedia student dictionaries are another educational product developed at IIK-CDRIL for language programs to teach Arikara, Assiniboine, and Pawnee. These dictionaries are scaled-down versions of the comprehensive linguistic reference dictionaries developed at IIK-CDRIL. They contain sound recordings of all entry words and enable students to hear native pronunciation of written renditions.
