FLC now offers Colorado’s only Navajo bilingual teacher endorsement
DURANGO, CO – The Colorado Department of Higher Education has officially approved the Fort Lewis College Teacher Education Department to offer the Bilingual Culturally Linguistic Diverse education endorsement. Students who are bilingual in English and Spanish or Navajo can now earn a Bilingual Specialist Endorsement to go with their teacher licensure. The Spanish endorsement has existed at FLC in the past, and today Fort Lewis College is the only college in Colorado that offers a Bilingual Specialist Endorsement in Navajo.
“This feature of the Teacher Education Program at Fort Lewis College is critical as we prepare future teachers for increasingly diverse classrooms of the 21st century in the Four Corners and across our nation,” says Dr. Richard Fulton, director of the FLC Teacher Education Department. “In many classrooms in the west and especially in the region, between 30 and 50 percent of students can come from homes that don't speak English as their first language. The ability to offer a teaching endorsement in bilingual Spanish and Navajo is a great benefit to P-12 schools in our Four Corners region.”
Today, 30 percent of FLC’s student body is Native American, with more than 155 tribes represented on campus. There were more than 500 Navajo students enrolled at FLC in fall 2014, making it the largest tribe represented on campus.
“It required collaboration with Diné (Navajo) language experts in New Mexico to determine how to most effectively assess the Diné language proficiency for the endorsement,” explains Jen Rider, coordinator of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education at FLC. “Many of our education students come from communities in New Mexico and Arizona, and the Diné language proficiency exam is the same exam that is required of NM and AZ teachers to be certified to teach at bilingual schools in those states.
“I think (and hope) that it demonstrates how much we support Navajo language and culture. Being a Native American-serving institution, it is one way that we can add to the goals of our mission statement and hopefully recruit more pre-service teachers from surrounding communities.”
The value of the Spanish endorsement becomes clear when examining the nation’s changing population. The Pew Research Center and U.S. Census Bureau project that America’s Hispanic population will about double from now to 2050. Since 1970, the Hispanic population has grown by nearly 600 percent.
Fort Lewis College also has a growing Hispanic community. Currently, 10 percent of the FLC student body identifies themselves as Hispanic.
For more information on the new endorsements, contact Jen Rider in the FLC Teacher Education Department at 970-247-7418.