Sucess Stories

About This Issue

Dear Readers:

We hope that our readers and their students alike will enjoy and be inspired by this annual Success Stories issue of TCALL’s quarterly publication. We’ve broken last year’s record by publishing 22 stories of adult learner success, all but two written by the learners themselves. Four of those articles feature GED learners and 18 are tales of English language learner success. It seems that Ysleta Community Learning Center in El Paso and Fuente Learning Center of Austin are competing to send TCALL the greatest number of these inspiring adult learners’ stories.

Five articles describe successful teaching experiences or strategies. Texas Tech University linguistics major Rebecca Neitzel describes her life-changing experience as a tutor in the Texas Tech ESL Initiative, a joint project in which college students earn course credit while tutoring adults through Literacy Lubbock. Dr. Clarena Larrotta of Texas State University-San Marcos contributes an article based on her study of inquiry circles and other curricular interventions in adult English as a second language classrooms. TCALL Professional Development Specialist and former New Jersey Writing Project Teacher Trainer Ken Appelt shares what he learned about writing from both the teacher and student perspective at the University of Iowa Writing Lab.

Local program successes are featured in articles by Ricardo Brambila of AVANCE-Rio Grande Valley’s Bilingual Parent-Child Education Program and Paul L. Murad of the Montgomery chapter of Literacy Volunteers of America. Sue Barker writes of a successful collaboration between Mt. Pleasant ISD Even Start and Northeast Texas Community College Adult Education, in which lunch hour meetings serve as a forum for program improvement and team building.

At the level of statewide success stories, Barbara Tondre-El Zorkani of Texas LEARNS hopes her description of the first annual Workforce Literacy Summit held in San Antonio April 21-23 will inspire readers to attend the next Summit in Spring 2009. Chris Palacios of Del Mar College writes of being the first to complete the new Texas Adult Education Administrator Credential. Don’t miss Chris’s smiling face along with others in the first cohort to complete the Administrator Credential. Finally, as we pass the first anniversary of the June 2007 official rollout of the Texas Adult Education Content Standards and Benchmarks, all the teachers, administrators, state leadership, and adult learners who contributed to the development of that cutting-edge resource for our state should take pride in the words of our colleague Melody Clegg from the state of Idaho, whose imitation/adaptation of Texas’ Standards and Benchmarks for their own state’s use is indeed the sincerest form of praise.

We at TCALL would also like to congratulate Advocacy Outreach in Elgin for being the only Texas program to be awarded a national Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy grant for 2008-2009. Ten more programs have been awarded grants from The First Lady’s Family Literacy Initiative for Texas. Those are: Austin Community College; Austin Learning Academy; AVANCE-Waco; Bryan ISD; Carrizo Springs ISD; Community Action, Inc., San Marcos; Corpus Christi ISD; Mi Escuelita Preschool, Dallas; Mount Pleasant ISD; Plano Education Foundation.

Harriet Vardiman Smith
Interim TCALL Director
and Clearinghouse Project Director

Please note: In the case of adult learner-written articles, while the editorial decision was made to fix typos and spelling errors, in keeping with the article’s integrity, the authors’ words, for the most part, remained unchanged.