We document and disseminate various results, trainings, and resources from our research, programs, and projects.
In this issue of Focus on Basics, we explore the challenge of serving youth well without sacrificing the quality of service to older students. Our cover story and the two that follow it form a trilogy: the journey from theory, through professional development, to practice. Missouri literacy program director Janet Geary and a colleague participated…
Few would debate the value of postsecondary education, especially for General Educational Development (GED) credential holders and high-level students of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) who have high school diplomas. Making it happen is the challenge. The sad truth is that many adult basic education (ABE) students don’t perceive of college as a…
Curriculum is at the heart of adult basic education. It reflects our educational philosophy and beliefs about the goals of education. What are the different philosophical approaches to curriculum? What does research tell us about curriculum? How do teachers, programs, even states go about creating curriculum, and what lesson can we learn from them? In…
We know that welfare recipients, the working poor, people of color, and immigrants are disproportionately represented in adult basic education (ABE) and English for speakers of other languages (ESOL). We also know that the majority of adults enrolled in literacy programs are women. Thus, as Deborah D’Amico writes on page 27, ABE/ESOL serve primarily those…
This Focus on Basics, slim as it may be, may be more useful than any of us imagined when we chose the subject for this issue. We start off with findings from NCSALL’s Persistence Research that highlight the role of what authors John Comings and Sondra Cuban call “sponsors”: those individuals who help learners get…
This issue of Focus on Basics explores some of the many ways in which literacy and health partnerships are enacted. They tend to fall into two categories: approaches that seek to empower students to navigate more easily the often overwhelming U,S. healthcare system, and approaches that seek to educate literacy students about and alleviate health…
As in most fields of research and theory, adult development has a variety of “camps”—different schools of thought on how adults develop—four of which are described by Lisa Baumgartner in the article that starts on page 29. Behavioristic / mechanistic; psychological / cognitive; contextual / sociocultural; and integrated, Lisa points out that our teaching choices…
The teachers writing in this issue of Focus on Basics do know a lot about teaching reading. Ashley Hagar, of Cambridge, Massachusetts; Gladys Geertz, of Anchorage, Alaska; and Anne Murr of Des Moines, Iowa, all bring immense skill to their classrooms and programs. They all have found that very structured classes, with direct instruction in…
Immigrants’ linguistic, economic, and civic integration is a complex issue that is best addressed by networks of organizations that align their efforts around this common goal. This publication features the work and lessons learned by five such local networks as they planned and implemented immigrant integration services and activities with adult education in a central…
World Education believes that it is youth themselves who offer the greatest potential for breaking the cycle of their own exclusion and disadvantage, if given the right tools, technologies, resources, skills and space to do so. From Australia and China to Brazil and France, ConnectEd has done just that. Since 2011, the program has seen…
World Education strives to build lasting relationships with partners across diverse geographic regions and technical sectors to produce better education outcomes for all.
