Letter from the Director:
Success Stories
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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
