Letter from the Director:
Success Stories
by
Dominique Chlup
Director of TCALL
.jpg) Dear Readers,
Well, it is official. The TCALL newsletter has been called Literacy
Links for a decade.
Given the fact that this is the periodical’s tenth
year of existence, under its current nomenclature, we feel it is most
fitting that the theme of this issue is Persistence. Literacy
Links has
been persisting in the field for quite some time. It actually dates back
to 1988-89 when it was called “Notes from Riverside.” We
look forward to the periodical persevering and persisting for decades
to come.
And now for what you will find in this issue… The area of persistence
is one that has captured my attention both as a practitioner and as a
researcher. I remember vividly the first time I “lost” a
student. Not just any student, but my “star” student, the
student who as a first year adult educator I had pinned all my hopes
on. He was destined for greatness. In my wishful, optimistic first days
of teaching, I was so sure of that.
I have to smile at myself now when I think back to those days and remember
how disappointed I was in myself and in him when he left the program
mere months before graduating. At the time, though, I was not well versed
in issues of motivation, retention, or persistence. I had nothing to
offer him when he told me one Friday afternoon that he was leaving the
NYC based program and moving back to upstate New York to be closer to
his elderly parents.
If I had only known that persistence extends beyond the length of time
an adult attends a class or tutoring session. Instead, it can be defined
as “adults staying in programs for as long as they can, engaging
in self-directed study when they must drop out of their programs, and
returning to a program as soon as the demands of their lives allow” (Comings,
Parrella, Soricone, 2000). Then perhaps, I would have had in place a
component to my teaching that allowed my students to engage in independent
study when they needed to leave the program. Perhaps, I would have been
more forgiving of myself and of him when he told me he needed to leave
the program. And perhaps, there would have been a system in place that
would have easily allowed for him to re-enter the program if he had chosen
to do so at a later date.
It was my direct experience of seeing some of my most determined students
not complete their studies that fueled my initial interest in the area
of persistence. What began as a practitioner-based concern developed
into an area I wanted to research, and when I learned that others in
the state of Texas were also interested in this area, I did not need
any more prompting than that to start a research project. As such, you
will find an article that I co-authored
with TCALL’s Professional
Development Specialist Ken Appelt on Project Persist, the professional
development endeavor and research study that we have been involved with
for almost two years.
This edition is also filled with several articles that address programmatic
and instructional practices to help adult literacy learners persist in
their studies. Many articles in this issue touch on the importance of
orientation in aiding students to stick with programs. For a specific
example of a successful orientation program, you can read Angeline
Bessette-Kaldro’s
article.
And if you want to know how to create a classroom learning community
from day one, then Dr. Sherry Nash offers some useful advice in her article.
Motivating, retaining, and approaching students from day one through
day three hundred are all discussed in the articles by Connie
Seibert,
Tom Enright, and Mary Sharp.
Robin Schwarz in her article specifically addresses how to help English
Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) persist in their studies. She provides
an instructional technique designed to target a specific problem in
language acquisition.
If you have ever wondered what personal trainers and adult literacy
educators have in common, then you will be delighted by the innovative
technique described in the article “Classroom
Success=Retention, Or is it Retention=Classroom Success?”
TCALL’s Family Literacy Specialist Jacqueline
Gramann and Even
Start Expert Dr. Ann Gundy take
an interesting approach to persistence and in their co-authored article
describe how family literacy programs can survive and persist in the
face of funding cuts.
And lest we forget the pivotal role that teachers play in learner persistence,
in addition to instructional and programmatic strategies, Linda
Ross in her reflection of Parker Palmer’s (1998) book
The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s
Life offers thoughtful and hopeful insight.
I hope that this issue will provide you with new strategies and insightful
ideas for increasing learner persistence. I know that the more I learn
about persistence the more I consider how I could have approached not
just the day when my “star” pupil informed me that he was
leaving the program, but all the days leading up to it as I have learned
helping students persist begins from the moment of recruitment.
Reference
Comings, J., Parrella, A., & Soricone, L. (March 2000). Helping
adults persist: Four supports. Focus on Basics, 4 (A), 1, 3-6.
Happy Reading,
Dr. Dominique T. Chlup
Director of TCALL &
Principal Investigator on the Clearinghouse Project
  
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