Delgado AEP, Youth Empowerment Project, and LAPCAE recently joined forces to bring the voices of adult education students our state's community college conference, LCTCS 2019. Adult education programs must provide opportunities for students to speak for themselves. If we listen we will learn the answers to persistence and success, without even asking. This session will report on the work taking place in Louisiana to expand opportunities for student leadership in adult education.

Every student explores pathways that will lead to success. When someone seeks opportunities for self-improvement, skills training, or knowledge acquisition that Adult Education provides, that choice is their first step on a journey that we help navigate. Join me as we review, renew, and reveal the tools and tactics for discovering the passions and potential of our students. An opportunity to lead increases self-efficacy, while the correct leadership qualities support collaboration and mentorship.

Adult Education Leaders and Practitioners will explore strategies to encourage leadership among students through academics, service, mindset, and by celebrating their journey. Through lecture, active participation, and student stories this session will take a deep dive into program elements that develop and enhance leadership tools and opportunities to intensify student involvement, progression, and success.

One of the state of Washington’s corrections education goals was to develop a student group to incorporate student voice in program planning, development and evaluation of corrections education programs. Coyote Ridge Corrections Center lead the effort to create the “Student Voice”, a faculty nominated group of incarcerated students.

Student voice in adult education ensures that programs respond to learners’ articulated needs. Programs that respond to learners’ interests are better positioned to provide authentic support. A panel of adult English Language Learners share insights into how advocating for their needs has helped them reach their academic and career potential. Participants walk away with ideas to cultivate student leadership and voice within own programs.

This session examines a new approach to US naturalization preparation courses incorporating civic engagement, critical analysis of US history and culture, and knowing one’s rights and responsibilities into traditional material about the naturalization process. Participants will explore new approaches to citizenship preparation, and learn how to equip and inspire students to participate in their communities. Participants will come away with curriculum ideas and approaches for critically engaging English learners with social justice.

Starting a Student Leadership Team in adult education can be very difficult. At Fontana Adult School, we began a Team and grew it to 29-members strong over a course of 6 months. The Team has been instrumental in our marketing efforts, in building school climate, improving our school culture, and building capacity. The presentation will walk through the step-by-step process on how this can be done at other adult education, CTE, and post-secondary education sites.

This workshop will provide context for creating a student-centered classroom by modeling successful collaborative classroom environment. Research based instructional practices that celebrate diversity in the classroom and empowers students by raising the bar from a deficit model to a strengths perspective while delivering relevant and timely innovations in teaching today's urban youth. This interactive, engaging, and timely workshop will empower teachers to reach for excellence in urban educational spaces.

For adult learners, finding their voice can be difficult. Beginning with results from an experimental evaluation of adult learners as leaders, this interactive session first shares new findings on the connection of leadership training with cultivating learner voice. Then participants will interact around implications from the findings for staff and programs to enhance practice while supporting learners in developing voice. Recommendations are offered on building relationships, fostering community and collaboration, and encouraging voice through activities.

ESL and ABE students have amazing stories, ideas, and capacity to make change. One of our roles as educators is to provide space for students to share their voices and develop their leadership while also building their academic skills. Join this session and hear directly from educators and students about how using The Change Agent, a magazine written by and for students, can create space for sharing ideas, strengthening skills, and tapping into students’ passions.

What is the Student Ambassador Program, and is it the right fit for your learners? Three Colorado Adult Education programs will hold a panel to describe lessons learned about implementing this train-the-trainer student leadership and advocacy training. Participants will leave feeling equipped to engage in a training at their local level and will also benefit from the opportunities and challenges explained by the panel.

Ambassadors training focuses on student voice in the fullest sense. Adult learners develop new identities and roles in which they can share powerful stories and represent common interests and needs of others. Student ambassadors grow confidence and acquire skills that transfer to other areas of their lives. Participants will become experts in four crucial components of representational leadership for adult basic education: Awareness, Powerful Stories, Public Speaking, Relational Meetings with elected officials.

As more educational institutions move towards the trauma informed lens it leaves one to wonder "What are we doing with this information?" We understand how trauma impacts learning, we understand how it interrupts development, and lastly, how it continues to fester decades later. Our hope is to shift community climate positively. By addressing the root causes of trauma with our learners in a meaningful way we empower them to heal.

Student voice in the mathematics classroom: creating space for student talk across multiple participation structures

An established body of evidence suggests a strong relationship between classroom dialogue and student learning. This presentation reports on current work investigating adult students’ participation across multiple participation structures: whole-class warm-up/share-out and small group problem-solving. Video analysis of classroom discussion focuses on students’ dialogic interaction across the phases of a lesson. All attendees will leave the presentation with strategies for selecting tasks and varying participation structures to increase student engagement in their own classrooms.

Family literacy has come to the forefront in 2020 as adults struggle to meet their learning needs and those of their children during the Pandemic. This session will re-examine the status of family literacy after Even Start was defunded. We will share and discuss the findings from two national surveys that were conducted to update the Goodling Institute’s 2017 publication Changing the Course of Family Literacy.

This presentation explores an academic support program referred to as Supplemental Instruction (SI) that takes a holistic approach towards student learning and can be replicated at your institution. Key takeaways include learning methods to support Adult Education students entering healthcare career programs and how to customize academic support for your students. Participants will walk away with strategies they can integrate in their programs and activities to utilize when implementing SI.

Looking for an easy way to collaborate with your adult learners from a distance? Give Wakelet a try! It’s a free and easy-to-use platform to collaborate, curate and organize materials, bookmark and share. It can be used to curate student work, while keeping it private by using spaces. It can also be used to organize your professional resources from across the web in one place. Wakelet is also a great tool for flipped instruction.

Though most states now rely on remote or distance education, many either don’t have a distance education policy or need to update an old one. Policy leaders from IDEAL Consortium member states, known to prioritize distance education and blended learning, share highlights of their distance education policies. Attendees will leave with examples of state distance education policies and ideas for how to interpret, implement, or advocate for revision of the policy that guides their instruction.

Adults must learn how to share information and communicate with people from other cultures and social groups successfully. The presenters describe strategies that adult educators can use to teach intercultural communication skills (e.g., visual culture assimilators, cultural problem solving, emotion role-play, relational approach to empathy, film). Through interactive facilitation, conference attendees can expect narratives, examples, resources, discussion, and Q&A. The goal is for participants to apply these strategies across different adult education programs.

Remote learning in Adult Education and Literacy is here to stay! Would you like to add to your toolbox of engaging, hands-on, interactive activities for your virtual ESL classes? Was that a “Yes”? Well, mark your calendar to attend this workshop. You’ll see, experience and collaboratively create listening, speaking, reading and writing activities that engage and educate students, enliven instruction, and target CCR standards.

One of the most difficult challenges for many students to become a high school equivalency graduate is writing a passing argumentative essay. That's especially true for lower-level students and those whose native language isn't English, but this essay doesn't have to be the barrier that stops your students from reaching their goal. Learn how to teach your students to write a simple 7-sentence essay to fulfill all the writing requirements for the HiSET® argumentative essay.

Work-based learning is designed to provide learners with experiences to develop and demonstrate personal, workplace and technical skills. Learners expand awareness of career options, additional needed training and their own strengths and interests. In this session, participants will explore components of effective work-based learning strategies and collaborate with peers to review high-quality project activities to incorporate into existing WBL programs to increase student engagement and experience effectiveness.

Developing a student leadership program is an important part of creating a student-centered organization. This session will explore the steps to developing and supporting student leadership, demonstrate how having student leaders improves adult literacy organizations, and then provide recommendations for how to use and support student leaders from the perspective of three student leaders.

We all want a good life and to be part of creating one for ourselves, our families, and our communities. Climate Change disproportionately affects the communities that Adult Education serves. Adult Education can provide information about sustainability and opportunities for Adult Learners to learn, take action, and contribute to conversations, strategies, and policies to protect people and planet.

In this workshop, we present visual-thinking strategies, inquiry-based learning, and drama-based pedagogies to build the civic knowledge and advocacy skills of adult basic education learners. The methods are presented in conjunction with Shola’s Voice, a new episode in the We Speak NYC ESOL/civics drama series, addressing democracy, immigration, education and other issues in the context of today’s challenging times. Workshop participants will receive materials for implementing the methods and activities in your classrooms and programs.

Hear from a student panel how climate change lessons have developed their leadership skills. Learn strategies for teaching climate change to empower rather than overwhelm, and receive valuable teaching resources. Adult education students are frequently among those most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, but often have little knowledge about this critical issue. As adult educators, we have a powerful opportunity to support students to become leaders and help create a truly sustainable future.

COABE's Student Ambassador Program trains adult learners to be advocates and programs to support them. In this presentation, hear from programs and learners across the country as they share their experience implementing the Ambassador program on both the state and program level.

Do you want to make a difference in your community but don’t feel like you have a voice? Come to Advocacy 101 to learn how you can become an advocate and influence public opinion on all levels.

COABE’s Student Ambassador Program trains adult learners to become advocates and find their voices as leaders in the field. Come hear, in their own words, their stories and how they have used their Ambassador skills to improve their communities, programs, and lives - and maybe join the Ambassador Program yourself!

Join us to learn about how you can participate in COABE’s field challenge: Programs Succeed When Learners Lead. This presentation will not only include voices from the field sharing why they are participating, but will also include strategies for getting your plans off the ground, and time to work together on envisioning what student leadership 2.0 looks like as we embrace our digital age and design leadership opportunities from the classroom to the capitol.

When in-person programming paused, CAACE brought together their statewide community in ways that hadn’t been done before: they sponsored a statewide, virtual CDP class to study how individuals in the US have used their voices to advocate for themselves and others on both local and national platforms. Come hear what they learned, how they applied those lessons to advocate for adult education, and how they see themselves applying the skills and information in the future.

Adult education providers must center students in policy and program design. The All In: Student Pathways Forward podcast elevates adult education and community college student voices in Oregon to shape inclusive policies, programs and partnerships. The podcast creator, Marc Goldberg, along with Rogue Community College President Dr. Cathy Kemper-Pelle and National Skills Coalition State Strategies Director Kate Kinder will discuss the impact of this unique podcast, spotlighting a Rogue Integrated Education and Training student.

Who understands the strengths and struggles of adult education applicants and students better than current learners and recent graduates? Peer-to-peer support is an invaluable tool for Adult Education programs and in this session Marissa Teager and Susan Gusler from Austin Community College will share how their program hires and develops learners as hourly student support staff.

One of the state of Washington’s corrections education goals was to develop a student group to incorporate student voice in program planning, development and evaluation of corrections education programs. Coyote Ridge Corrections Center lead the effort to create the “Student Voice”, a faculty nominated group of incarcerated students.