September 22, 2016
OCTAE encourages all
stakeholders and advocates to participate in and explore the many resources
available during National Adult Education and Family Literacy
Week, from Sept. 26–Oct 1. The celebration is designed to raise public
awareness about the need for and value of adult education and family literacy
in order to leverage resources to support access to basic education programs
for the 36 million U.S. adults with low literacy skills.
OCTAE particularly invites
stakeholders to not only access and explore the online LINCS community and its many resources but also to consider
joining LINCS. Funded by OCTAE, LINCS
provides a community of practice for adult education
practitioners—a professional learning space—that brings together adult
educators worldwide to provide high-quality, evidence-based learning
opportunities to adult students. The site is a place where the adult education
community can seek help, collaborate, network, share knowledge and resources,
participate in special events, and grow professionally. Interested parties do
not need to wait until Sept. 26 to join and share LINCS with others—the LINCS resource collection and learning portal are available 24/7.
Learners can access the LINCS Learner
Center, in English or Spanish,
at any time from any device. For more on this topic and to follow events in
real time, use the Twitter hashtag #AEFLWeek and follow LINCS at @LINCS_ED.
Visit the OCTAE Blog and
the Commission on Adult Basic
Education and National
Coalition for Literacy websites to explore many new and exciting
initiatives and for information on planned activities during Adult
Education and Family Literacy Week.
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All
minority-serving community colleges and other interested parties are invited to
participate in the second annual national convening of minority-serving
community colleges. This event will take place Nov. 1–2, 2016, at the U.S.
Department of Education, in Washington, D.C., and will offer opportunities to
- exchange
promising practices on student success institutions from across the country;
- meet
representatives from federal agencies and learn about federal programs for minority-serving institutions;
- hear from and
speak with researchers and funders;
- interact with
representatives from the U.S. Department of Education; and
-
engage with
minority-serving community college communities of practice.
There
is no conference fee; however, your institution will need to pay for all
related travel expenses, meals, and miscellaneous costs. Due to space constraints,
attendees are limited to two representatives from each college. For information on
registration, agenda, and other details, please visit the meeting website.
Registration
is limited to 200 participants on a first-come, first-served basis. If capacity
is not reached sooner, registration will close on Oct. 14, 2016.
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The
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Wisconsin HOPE
Lab have co-authored a new resource, Addressing
Housing Insecurity and Living Costs in Higher Education: A Guidebook for
Colleges and Universities. This guidebook assists institutions of
higher education as they consider, evaluate, implement, and scale up programs
and policies to support students’ learning, persistence, and completion rates.
With college enrollment levels high despite stagnant or declining family
incomes and increasing college costs, many college students are struggling to
make ends meet. Improving the quality of students’ lives is essential to
boosting their odds of success in school.
Drawing
on examples from institutions nationwide, this guidebook describes strategies
that colleges and universities can implement in order to support students experiencing
housing insecurity and challenges covering living costs, such as food and
childcare. Strategies include, for instance, establishing a campus single point
of contact to connect students with benefits and provide emergency aid.
HUD
has recently explored and promoted a range of strategies to support students,
including those enrolled in higher education.
The
Wisconsin HOPE Lab is the nation’s first translational laboratory aimed at
identifying new and effective ways to minimize barriers to college completion
so that more students can reach their full potential. The lab has published
essential research exploring these challenges and identifying ways to support
students on its website at http://wihopelab.com/.
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A recent report from
SRI Education and The Joyce Foundation, Empowering
Adults to Thrive at Work: Personal Success Skills for 21st Century Jobs, discusses how evidence-based research provides guidance
for promoting personal success skills for adults who are striving to build
sustainable 21st-century careers.
As
research shows, there are millions of unemployed and underemployed individuals
in the United States. Empowering Adults
maintains that to build a sustainable career in the 21st-century workforce, no
matter the job or occupation, adults need not only academic, technical, and
professional knowledge but also a broad set of personal success skills. It is these skills that will enable workers
to deal with the challenges, relationships, transitions, and social systems
that make up working life. Among these
capacities, as identified by the report, are basic job readiness, self-directed
learning, self-management, personal responsibility, effective communication,
career management, and everyday problem solving. Through a coordinated, multifaceted system of
education, workforce development, and social services, strengthening the
personal success skills of individuals can provide them with “powerful levers
for succeeding in the working world.”
This
report (1) offers knowledge about the importance of personal work skills based
on the conviction that adults can develop them; (2) charts a path through the
research and practical knowledge regarding these skills; and (3) provides
actionable steps for research, policy, and practice. It stresses the importance of a “growth
mindset” that understands human ability as malleable and changeable while
acknowledging that learning can be “challenging – requiring strong effort, by
the learner, effective learning strategies, and support from others.”
Empowering Adults describes a
framework that integrates “two holistic conceptualizations” of skills that
promote personal success: foundational components and applied
competencies. The report concludes with
recommendations to “address barriers to providing effective and affordable
support for the development of the personal success skills necessary to build
sustainable careers.”
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