Adult Learner Transitions

Letter from the Director

Dear Readers:

At this year’s Texas Association for Literacy and Adult Education (TALAE) conference, I heard one of the program directors describe how obtaining the GED should be seen as a floor not a ceiling. She went on to explain that rather than seeing GED completion as an end goal, a stopping point, it is simply a starting point. I have to admit that I immediately became enamored with the idea of seeing all of adult literacy education as a floor—a floor with a springboard to more education and greater success. I do not ever think of education as having a ceiling, so I would argue neither should our adult learners.

This issue of Literacy Links exemplifies the spirit that education should lead to further education and that training should not just lead to the next job but lead to a better paying job; there is always a beyond, a next step. In this way, adult literacy education is seen as a process, a process of transitions. Therefore, this issue is devoted to transitions and how best to help adult learners transition educationally and professionally to that next step.

If you are looking to learn what the research reveals about the importance of transitioning students beyond our GED classrooms, I suggest you start this issue by reading Ken Appelt’s article. If it is concrete suggestions you seek, then you are in luck. Several of this edition’s articles address specifically the ESL classroom and transitioning English language learners into ABE classes, GED classes, the college classroom, and beyond. Four of this issue’s articles address the challenges and rewards of transitioning English language learners, including the articles by Jan Greening and Lee Williams, David Borden and Debbie Talavera, Lisa Gardner Flores, and Connie Seibert.

If you are interested in suggestions for helping ABE, ASE, GED students make successful transitions, you will also find plenty of articles in this issue to suit your needs. Authors David Joost, Chris Palacios, Cynthia Zafft, and Adeline Silva, Guadalupe Ruvalcaba, Aaron Smith, and Rene Coronado all tackle the transition from the adult education classroom to the college classroom or the workplace. Their years of experience and insight help them to offer practical transitions tips that teachers and programs can put into practice immediately.

For me, I think I really understood how important it is to transition adult learners to the college classroom and beyond when I learned the statistic that college graduates earn an average of 75% more income than high school graduates. Over the course of a career, that translates into a million dollars more in earnings for the college graduate than the high school graduate (U.S. Census Bureau, 2002). These figures are reported to be equivalent if not slightly higher when we compare college graduates to GED earners. I would never want my students to be stuck under the ceiling of that earnings cap. So I return again to the image of adult literacy programs as floors not ceilings, a place to begin, a good start, but by no means an end. As this issue will attest, here in Texas programs are practicing the concept of helping our students to transition above and beyond. I hope you will enjoy this issue and learn as much as I did about what individual programs here in Texas are doing to help transition adult learners.

Happy Reading,

Dr. Dominique T. Chlup
Director of TCALL &
Principal Investigator on the Clearinghouse Project

Day, J. C. & Newburger, E. C. (2002). The big payoff: educational attainment and synthetic estimates of work-life earnings. U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Surveys, March 1998, 1999, and 2000. Retrieved March 7, 2007 from http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/p23-210.pdf [Download Adobe® Acrobat® Reader to view this PDF file. ]