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Greening U.S. Adult Basic Skills Efforts

What Eco-Partners and Adult Educators Can Do Together

Welcome! We’ll begin soon.

Please use the chat to introduce yourself.

Tell us:

Your role in ABE/ESOL/GED
If you’re involved in environmental education in some way

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Greening U.S. Adult Basic Skills Efforts

What Eco-Partners and Adult Educators Can Do Together

A Webinar of the Open Door Collective

A National Program of Literacy Minnesota

September 24, 2020

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�Current, interwoven challenges

Our nation . . .

continues to be impacted by challenges to environmental sustainability.
also is affected by COVID-19, an economic downturn, increased social divisions, and an endangered national election.

cont’d.

.

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�Challenges (cont’d.)

These environmental, health, and economic problems disproportionately impact low-income communities, especially:

Black and Latinx adults (now facing COVID-19 exposure in workplaces)
isolated Native Americans
older adults
people with disabilities

Low-income adults also have disproportionately lower levels of basic skills, educational attainment, and secondary and post-secondary education credentials to deal with these challenges.

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Amid these challenges, � some good news …

Increased . . .

awareness of these interwoven issues;
desire and action to reduce and solve these interwoven problems of health, education, poverty, environment, and inequity;
growth in green technologies and jobs.

In this hour, we hope to contribute to collaborative, constructive dialogue, leadership, and action.

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As we proceed, �some words to consider:

“We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.”

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thank you for joining us, listening, and sharing your ideas.

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Tech Tips

Please keep your mic muted.
Use “chat” to respond to presenter questions and submit your own questions and ideas. (Presenters will respond either at the end of the webinar or afterward via email.)
At the end (and via a follow-up email), we will tell how to:

stay in touch with the presenters
join existing related online discussions, and
access resource materials and organizations.

Webinar is being recorded; a link to it will be available on the Open Door Collective website landing page.
If you have technical problems, contact Emma via the chat.

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What you’ve told us about yourselves

About a dozen registrants.
Primarily adult basic skills educators.
Some have integrated adult education with environmental themes.

Welcome!

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Our Webinar Team

Alex Risley Schroeder: Principal, Finding Earth Works
Barbara Krol-Sinclair: Director of Adult Learning, Chelsea (MA) Public Schools, Intergenerational Literacy Program
David J. Rosen, Ed.D. Consultant and Founding Member of the Open Door Collective (MA)
Emma Keating Digital Communications Specialist, The Literacy Cooperative, Cleveland (OH)
Paul Jurmo: Consultant & Chair of the Open Door Collective’s Labor and Workforce Development Issues Group

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Webinar Objectives & Activities

Clarify the interwoven challenges our nation faces.
Understand why and how adult educators and supporters of environmental sustainability might work together to produce diverse benefits.
Identify possible follow-up actions including:

Connecting with useful resource materials;
Continuing this discussion today, within your organizations, and with other networks (e.g., ODC).

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Key Stakeholders

Adults with basic skills limitations who often

come from communities and jobs with significant environmental challenges, and
despite significant strengths can have limited material and social supports to deal with those challenges and pursue emerging green job opportunities.

“Eco” (or “environmental”) partners who support environmental sustainability and/or green jobs.
Adult education providers (basic literacy and numeracy, ESOL, GED, college-readiness, workforce training….)
Social justice advocates concerned about well-being of adult learners and their families and communities.

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How Collaborate? �What the ODC Can-Do Guide says �

Education to help learners address environmental issues and be environmental stewards
Green job preparation
Green services for learners to save money and energy and protect their health
Building capacities of eco-partners to serve adults with basic skills challenges

cont’d.

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How Collaborate?�cont’d.�

Greening of adult education facilities
Green service learning
Joint advocacy, planning, fundraising
Collaborative research
Joint professional development

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Benefits of collaboration

Stakeholders	Benefits
Learners	Basic skills and knowledge – including math and science – contextualized to environmental issues Connections to environmental training, jobs and services Financial and energy saving strategies
Environmental partners	Connections to adult learners and their families
Adult educators / programs	Access to environmental resources (e.g., educators, employers materials, services) to better serve learners cont’d

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Benefits of collaboration�(cont’d.)

Stakeholders	Benefits
Green employers	Connections to workers with relevant basic skills and environmental knowledge
Policy makers, funders, researchers	Increased understanding of how to help ABE/GED/ESOL learners respond to environmental challenges and opportunities.
Larger community	Informed, active citizens who can help improve environmental well-being of community

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Examples

Intergenerational Literacy Program, Chelsea (MA) Public Schools: Barbara
ABE Clean Energy Ambassadors: Alex

Please use the chat to share questions, ideas, examples

while Barbara and Alex are talking.

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Intergenerational Literacy Program

Community partnerships

Learner involvement

Learner leadership council initiative to petition city for more public trash cans
Expanding awareness about recycling
Public health concerns
Our own community garden plot

Connection to classroom work

Community parnterships: With the Community Garden, we visited and helped. Eventually, we were allotted a program-wide plot. A teacher started the program, but it’s completely learner-led and managed now. Collaborative decisions on what will grow, how will apportion crops, etc. Many learners who started with our garden move on to receiving their own plots.

We collaborate with GreenRoots on several initiatives, which allows us to help our learners find ways to take action without our trying to be everything to everyone and lose site of what we’re good at.

Learner involvement: Beyond that, though, learners take the lead on initiatives within our own program community (detail examples)

One of the most exhilarating aspects of teaching in adult education is that our classes can focus in on content that is immediately relevant and applicable to learners’ daily lives and goals.

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Intergenerational Literacy Program curriculum

Units in all classes on environmental issues

Weather/climate change
Recycling and trash
Pollution and public health
Urban gardening
Civic engagement and social justice

In all of our adult classes—3 levels of ESOL, ESOL family literacy, and ABE & HSE in Spanish—there are multiple units in the curricula addressing green issues over an instructional year. Embedding issues that learners and their families experience on a daily basis means that classroom learning connects with positive change.

Examples are weather and climate change---both locally and in their communities of origin—reading and discussing both the facts and the underlying reasons

Recycling and trash—again, comparing their current and childhood experiences

The effects of pollution on public health—and particularly children’s health-–are especially aggressive in a gateway community such as ours: mineral pile correlated with asthma rates, for example.

Urban gardening, as previously mentioned, allowing learners to build on knowledge they brought with them to their lives here, strengthen their connection to the environment, and share planting and growing with their children.

When learners are made aware of civic engagement mechanisms that can affect the quality of life in their communities, the impact reaches far beyond the classroom—such as the mineral piles, etc.

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Chelsea

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Chelsea

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ABE Clean Energy Ambassadors Curriculum Resource Guide

Work

Home

Academic Skills

Community

Learning about clean energy

Funded with a Workforce Capacity Grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and additional support from World Education, Inc.

Alex: The Adult Basic Education (ABE) system has had very limited exposure to clean energy concepts and career pathways.

Yet, adult education is a crucial component of the workforce development pipeline with largely untapped potential to motivate and prepare low-skilled, low-income adults to pursue training for clean energy-related jobs, while also building clean energy awareness in adults who, as consumers, tend to be outside of such education efforts.

The Clean Energy Ambassadors Curriculum Resource Guide is a collection of materials, lessons and activities that adult educators can use to integrate clean energy concepts into their curricula.

It was initially developed for adult educators from eight Massachusetts ABE programs participating in the ABE Clean Energy Ambassadors Project, funded with a Workforce Capacity Grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and additional support from World Education, Inc.

The project’s goal – and the guide’s as well – is to strengthen the on-ramp to clean energy occupations for Massachusetts ABE students.

This can be accomplished by increasing the expertise of ABE teachers and counselors who work with ABE learners so that clean energy industries can be presented and investigated in the context of ABE instruction and counseling. This gives learners essential information about job prospects and requirements, training, and career pathways.

The value of this on-ramp can’t be underestimated: the shift that clean energy will create in our economy will require all citizens to know and understand these changes.

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Resources for teachers
Lesson sequences

GED,
ABE/ESOL,
Advising/Counseling,
Developmental English and Math

The clean energy content got students to think beyond the GED and to dream about possible careers and begin to consider what skills they’d need.

While there are myriad websites, teacher resources, and other materials dedicated to teaching about clean energy concepts, applications and occupations, very few of them are geared specifically for adult ESOL and Basic Education learners.

This guide gathers relevant resources, some of which were used by participating teachers and counselors from the participating programs to develop lesson sequences suitable in ABE/ESOL/GED classrooms.

The guide contains annotated resources culled from a substantial review of available materials at the time. The Guide was publishes in NEED DATE

Following these annotated resources are examples of the ways the clean energy materials might be used to teach a variety of subjects: Career Exploration; Math, Science and Language Arts; and GED Preparation, and issues related to home and work.

Next comes a collection of lessons, activities and approaches developed by participating ABE Clean Energy Ambassadors, teachers and counselors involved in this project. These lessons incorporate a variety of online, multi-media, and teacher-created resources and span a wide range of clean energy topics, approaches and student populations , including:

GED Lesson Sequence Examples

ABE/ESOL Lesson Sequence Examples

Advising/Counseling Lesson Sequence Examples

Developmental English and College Math Lesson Sequence Examples

Participating teachers and counselors developed lesson sequences based on their students’ needs, interests and educational levels. These can be used straight off the page, or tweaked with.

Or, you could take some of the annotated resources and incorporate them into your own currucilum.

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“Students and I came away very revitalized from the lessons. They had a lot more general knowledge than I expected. One student sparked discussion about how to conserve energy. Another had received a letter from Nat’l Grid because after they replaced their light bulbs their household had become one of the top energy savers in their area.”

The engagement of students and teachers/counselors in this project was strong and enthusiastic.

Participating teachers, as part of the overall project, met with and learned from clean energy employers and workforce development experts with deep experience in the clean energy space.

The information gained provided both specifics – like what kind of math skills does someone need to work in an entry level energy efficiency job, like insulation installer, what are the working conditions?

As well as more global – like what are the industry trends that might affect learners. In Massachusetts, energy efficiency and solar were growing at the time.

Additionally, a clean energy economy expert participated and helped to bridge the knowledge gap about consumer incentives like free energy audits and light bulbs that could be available for learners.

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“Incorporating clean energy lessons has made me more aware of the need to get students invested in important and controversial topics.”

“It got me to reflect on the ways that students form beliefs about the world and how tenuous the foundations for those beliefs can be.

“I learned that I can incorporate the clean energy content into all GED subject areas which allows the class to go into greater depth with one topic, explore the issues and read critically, form opinions”.

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�

Development of skits after a 5-lesson unit enabled ESOL- level 3 students to

practice their clean energy vocabulary,
demonstrate their understanding of the need for energy conservation and
articulate the case for energy efficiency. They were excited because these skills allow them to talk knowledgably to friends and family about this topic

“I’ll buy a new sweater,”

one student said in the

student-created skits.

I’ll end this quick overview of the Guide by sharing a little bit about a 5-lesson unite for ESOL This five lesson sequence culminated with student-created skits in which student actors develop a clean energy scenario ranging from

Convincing

a neighbor to recycle

a husband or roommate convincing their partner to turn down the heat

A girlfriend telling her boyfriend why he should slow down when driving

a couple buying a car that is more green

using recycled paper such as newspaper or comics to wrap gifts

A parent convincing a teenager to take short showers

Walking or taking a bicycle to get coffee

Bringing a mug to work for tea or coffee

Getting an energy audit from Mass Save

Leading up to this final applied lesson, the sequence covers vocabulary and basic climate change concepts using videos, quizzes, flashcards and class discussions.

Putting on a sweater is one very practical means to reduce energy consumption at home!

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One ESOL teacher shared her utility bills with her class.� Using the charts and graphs that appeared on the bill, students were able to practice their information interpretation skills.

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Questions? Comments? Ideas?

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Wrapping Up�Three Possible Follow Up Actions

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Action #1�Read, Use, and Share 2 Documents

ODC’s “Greening U.S. Basic Skills Efforts” Guide:

Examples for each of the 9 collaboration types
Ideas on how adult education and eco-partners can get started on creating productive collaborations
Links to programs and documents

World Education’s “ABE Clean Energy Ambassadors Curriculum Resource Guide”

Links to be sent to webinar participants via email after the webinar.

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Action #2: �Join the Open Door Collective.� http://opendoorcollective.org ( “Contact” tab)

A diverse national network of adult educators and others
Dedicated to developing adult basic skills education to help reduce poverty and achieve other important goals
Emphasizes collaborations between adult educators and adult basic skills education stakeholders involved in public health, environmental sustainability, workforce and economic development, criminal justice reform, digital inclusion, immigrant and refugee integration, services for older adults, and other social justice efforts.

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Action #3: Keep the discussion going.

Communicate with presenters via chat, for 15-30 minutes after this webinar, and via email afterward.
Watch for follow-up email about resources mentioned in this webinar that you can use when developing your programs and communicating with other stakeholders.
Give us feedback about webinar and ideas for additional webinars and activities.

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Honoring John Lewis

About the demonstrations in response to the killing of George Floyd, Congressman Lewis said:

It was very moving, very moving to see hundreds and thousands of people from all over America and around the world take to the streets to speak up, to speak out, to get into what I call good trouble.

And because of the action of young and old, Black, white, Latino, Asian-American and Native American, because people cried and prayed, pe0ple will never, ever forget what happened and how it happened, and it is my hope that we are on the way to greater change.

(On CBS This Morning in June, 2020)

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Keep up your important work of providing high-quality learning opportunities in this challenging time.

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Alex Risley Schroeder�alex@findingearthworks.com �findingearthworks.com �

Barbara Krol-Sinclair

barbaras@bu.edu

David Rosen

djrosen123@gmail.com

Open Door Collective www.opendoorcollective.org

Paul Jurmo

pjurmo@comcast.net www.pauljurmo.info