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As I prepare to go back to the ESOL Adult classroom, I have been thinking a lot about how to turn theories learned in the past two years into practice. I am creating a new curriculum, based on the “backward design process” framework of Tighe and Wiggins called, Understanding by Design (UbD). I will also be transforming the written curriculum into E-learning modules using Adobe Captivate for {We Speak America }.  It is a very creative process.  It is also life changing.  The impact of good pedagogy on the lives of adult learner is limitless.   But it takes a lot of planning and thinking, and a commitment to harness best practices.

How Do Adults (Re)Learn?

As a newly minted masters graduate, I find that there exists an imbalance in education graduate schools: an overemphasis on children and an unintentional neglect of adult learners.  Because of the dearth of adult educators in graduate school, there was no conversation between them and their K-12 colleagues.   I found myself trying to understand the K-12 cognitive framework and to desperately apply it to adult learning.

For instance, one of the first readings I had to plow through was Bransford’s “How Children Learn.” It was a valuable reading material for inexperienced educators, or for educators who were not in K-12, like me. Since most of my adult learners had an interruption in schooling somewhere down the K-12 line, applying the children learning theory was a profound cultural process. I had to wonder what happened to adult’s ability to learn if they had to stop going to school and work at the age of twelve. I was also curious what happened when they started having children of their own during their teenage years.  Of course, the interruption was occuring in the adult learner’s native language.   Fifteen years later, in the great land of opportunity, they found themselves in my classroom, learning English.  What makes them different from other adult learners, especially their American native-born counterparts, is the urgency by which they view the process of English language acquisition: a matter of survival, so to speak.  Their lives hinge on the few words they could learn so they could use them to take the train, negotiate for goods, and speak with their neighbors.

Luckily, in the U.S., there are free programs for adult immigrants.  Adult learners now have to understand that the world of education has changed since they left school.   In some schools, it has turned from a didactic to a more authentic learning process.   They might be surprise to hear a teacher ask them, “What would you like to learn?”  Most adult students come from countries that have yet to discover Paolo Freire and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.   They continue to view learners as empty vessels that need filling, with no less than information they could spout at any given minute. 

Re-learning is a process.  For immigrants, it is a cultural process.   Teachers are considered authority figures in some countries.  I came from such a culture.  We bow at their command.   They’re not the Freirian facilitators who see the classroom as a community of equals.   The process of learning is teacher-centered and teacher-led.   Change means a shift in the way we think about education, and a reassessment of how we are educated as children.

In the early part of the twentieth century, education focused on the acquisition of literacy skills: simple reading, writing, and calculating. It was not the general rule for educational systems to train people to think and read critically, to express themselves clearly and persuasively, to solve complex problems in science and mathematics. Now, at the end of the century, these aspects of high literacy are required of almost everyone in order to successfully negotiate the complexities of contemporary life. (more here)

Real Learning

I have been in adult education for fifteen years and have witnessed different models of teaching.  I have seen the range, from totalitarianism to absolute kumbaya freedom.   I have seen classrooms with full time teachers with health benefits and part-timers who swing in on rollerblades.    I have heard of stories in EF (Foreign) L programs abroad where teachers are “discovered” in tourist supermarkets and invited to teach because they’re 1. American 2. Blondes.   While that sounds more like Miss Texas, overall, their pedagogy, if it even exists, is a mystery.  Not surprising.  Many adult literacy teachers run into their jobs.  Like me, I proudly profess.  However, after a few years of adult-sitting, it behooves a teacher to do some research and find out best practices in the profession.  Yes, it is a profession.

First, I would give an adult education teacher one of Paolo Freire’s books.   Since Pedagogy of the Oppressed is so widely circulated, I would opt for Teachers as Cultural Workers.  I think it is important for an educator to get a holistic perspective of adult learners, not only of their lives in the U.S., but also in their respective countries.  Connect with their histories.  Explore why such history inform the lives they lead in their adopted country. Once an educator understands what they have been through, and what they need to survive in a new country, the educational voyage becomes a conversation between the different stakeholders.  It becomes a process of relearning for both parties. From here, real learning and teaching can begin.

Related Reading:  Understanding by Design, Paolo Freire Institute,

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I am one of the millions of Americans looking for a job in this economy. A daunting task, notwithstanding credentials under our belt. In the Internet economy, a new marketplace has been created for job seekers, only less than a decade old. Much of the conversation occurs online through social networking, Email, and career websites. It’s become more practical to have access to PDF conversion software than fancy resume paper. In real life, I have also mobilized my own network to alert me of job possibilities that come their way. Having worked in workforce education and development for years, I consider myself quite adept at the tricks of the trade. However, in this economy, where the competition for ONE job is prodigious, how we play the game, be it real or virtual, has become the function not only of know-how, but intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Support systems have become even more critical. “Don’t Quit” and “Just Do It” are mantras. It is truly the economy of survival of the fittest.

Survival is also the name of the game for many low-skilled, low-wage earners. The downturn economy has proven the disposability of the lowest rung. As I have plugged into news websites about poverty and the unemployed, I read about communities of fear while middle-class America slips down the economic ladder. They have every reason to be afraid. Generations removed from the Great Depression and World War 2, many of them have been so pampered by the American economy that they have very little idea about what long-term unemployment looks like at the end of the road: receiving public assistance (handouts, as they say), be on Medicaid, or be subjected to eviction; the daily realities of being poor in America. But lucky are they who have enough skills to stand up and walk out of scut work once the economy pumps enough financial blood. For many, when this crisis is over, it’s just another nightmare deserving of the yesteryear hall-of-shame. But for the long-term poor, it’s business as usual.

Imagine Maria

She doesn’t know what participatory democracy is. She will receive mail about the Census that will most likely end up at the bottom of a junk mail pile. She lives in public housing in the inner city of a throbbing American city, the magnificence of which she sees but doesn’t really understand. She is one of the 23 million Limited English Proficient Americans. She works in a Nursing Home, in the kitchen, two days a week, as required by public assistance. For three days, she is learning English in a Work-Study program, which unbeknowst to her, is about to fall victim to budget cuts in her city. In her program, she is learning to use the computers and the Internet. The word “Internet” is beginning to register in her mind, although she associates it more with Telemundo punto com, which she hears from TV every night.

Her three children are in public schools, which she has only visited when summoned by the principal’s office. They are all failing schools, another mammoth discussion over education in America, way too high above Maria’s radar. She does know they’re failing; all the parents are up and arms about the issue. She doesn’t know what it is she or they can do. If they closed, they move to another school. Simple.

She has worked, time and again. She has become a nanny, a housecleaner, an environmental service worker at a hospital, a maintenance worker at a subway station–mostly minimum wage jobs that can’t pay for her kids. None of her jobs lasted long enough for sustainability. It’s become a way of life: unemployment, welfare. She wants to work, and who doesn’t in America? She has dreams for her children. As a single mother, she has learned her mistakes, and wants the best for her three kids. Maybe they will all live in a big house someday. The dreams are there, like old engines that coughs smoke and works, if only for a few enchanted hours. She passes on her dreams and reminds her children to finish school so they don’t turn out like she did. But failing schools in America have another plan for them.

In fact, as she sits in her class learning about Civics and self-empowerment, federal and state decisions are being made for her and her children about their future. Unlike many of us who hear about them on CNN or the Newsfeeds online and thus react, Maria’s concerns are the basics of living and survival. There are multiple barriers between her and the system built around her. Tomorrow, she needs to get up early so she can wash dishes in the Nursing Home. The next day, she will find out, her program closed. The rest of us may hear about it in the news. Because we have our own worries in life, we don’t pay much attention. We keep other people’s lives at bay. This is America. The land of opportunities. What are the chances that Maria’s circumstances will come knocking at our doors?

Wake up Call for Compassion

What I hope the downturn economy teaches all of us is compassion.  I do hope that these “communities of fear” turn into “communities of awareness” about our highly neglected neighbors ten blocks down.    I believe in the resilience of the American people amid adversity. One day, soon enough, this economic crisis will be over.   There will be many learning curves for each one of us affected by the crisis.  Let one of them be that we don’t forget to lend a hand to the likes of Maria and others who are left behind. 

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Related Reading: Why the 2010 Census Is So Important For Poor People, Domestic Poverty Controversies: Who is Poor and How We Treat Them,

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Inspiration for { WS★}

One of last year’s highlights was meeting Bill Drayton, Founder and CEO of Ashoka, an organization that promotes the citizen sector as change agents with innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing social problems.    Drayton was a trailblazer in social entrepreneurship (a term he coined himself).    Because of him, it has become much easier to find change agents all across the globe, people whose dreams to solve social issues are bigger than themselves.   I personally crave to know more about these people, about how they began and what they have accomplished.   Their stories are my inspiration. 

I find much in common with Bill Drayton’s citizen sector.  I don’t ever remember a time when I was not a community activist.   I founded organizations after college, although relatively inexperienced and naive.  At the time, the impetus was passion for social justice and nothing else.   While I am still the same person with same passion, I feel more equipped with many years of practice and education in my toolbelt.    Fast forward to now: the world has also become more perilous, with the added weight of environmental threat.  America is not the same country of dreams that I saw when I immigrated as a teen.  The first buildings that my father took me to visit in Manhattan, the twin towers, are no longer there, a sign of the changing global political tide. Social problems have become more complicated and complex.   As I plot my next voyage in life, I am faced with many choices between the realms of relative simplicity and safety and of risk and battles from which social change springs.   A couple of years ago, I made a choice.   This year, I keep a promise and move forward.

The Social Enterprise

By going online with { We Speak America }, I make a commitment to myself and to a social cause.   Since I am creating an internet-based organization, it makes sense to be online from the outset.  I know what it looks like on paper, having written two research studies and a business plan around the idea at Harvard.   I also chose a social enterprise as an organization model, because I believe there are many successful business principles that can be used to become a self-sustaining organization.    As we have seen in the Nobelist Muhammad Yunus’ work on microfinance, there are also a lot of opportunities in emerging markets. In his own words:

The impact of the business on people or environment, rather the amount of profit made in a given period measures the success of social business. Sustainability of the company indicates that it is running as a business. The objective of the company is to achieve social goal/s.

The Next Steps

There is a long task list ahead.   This includes identifying ONE target community, mapping low-wage jobs, facilitating community needs and skills assessment, designing curriculum around those needs, and turning the curriculum into online learning platforms.   I won’t be surprised if one of these days, I find myself in Nevada.  The state of Nevada has the 3rd fastest growing LEP population in the country.   It also has the highest unemployment rate.   I have decided at this point it will be more effective to start from the ground level (as opposed to partnering with established adult literacy organizations to pilot a program) and develop a prototype that clearly follows the business plan, including at its core, community organizing.  This way, I will have a clear understanding of what it will take to put a pilot together.  There are also many challenges ahead.  I have imagine what the obstacles might be, but I am also sure there will be many surprises. 

Thank you for visiting { WS★}.   The website will continue to improve and expand in the next few weeks. Thanks again to  many of you who have encouraged me along the way. 

Follow { WS★} on Facebook

Related Reading:  U.S. World Report on Bill Drayton,  Ashoka’s Stories of Change, Harvard Business School’s papers on Social Enterprise and Non-profits, From Kellogg’s conference A Transformational Approach, Columbia U’s RISE, Muhammad Yunus,

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Watching last night’s “Digital Democracy: Who Decides What’s Next?” on PBS, I ran into a quote by the President and CEO of Knight Foundation.  I eventually found it on their website:

We believe that if you’re not digital, you’re a second-class citizen. You’re second-class in access to information and second class economically and even socially. In a country where even entry-level job applications must be made online, denial of digital access equals denial of opportunity.

The forum/show was about the changing face of journalism and on how people get the news.   I don’t remember the last time I bought a newspaper.   I get my news from watching CNN or BBC, and mostly, from independent sources on the Internet.   My Internet life, and I call it “Life”, is highly contextualized and coalesced.   I am plugged in 24/7, without any sense of guilt or withdrawal.  It’s a lifestyle now.  I wake up, make coffee, make breakfast, whilst surfing the net for news.   My work is also the intersection of education and technology.   I feel that participatory democracy begins here, in bytes.   That said, I also recognize the foundational problems for those who was referred to last night as the digital age’s second class citizens.

The Digitally Marginalized

The world moves very fast, nary a blink about the ones who are left behind.  For centuries, the have-nots give the haves momentary guilt and for the most part, the inclination to simply move on.   Life is the becoming of Darwin’s survival of the fittest.   If you are poor, it must be your fault, or at least your gene’s.  

The digital age has opened the pathways to all walks of life.   We are constantly watching people far away.  When the recent earthquake hit Haiti, there was a barrage of images in the media, especially on the Internet.  We are moving very close to the real lives of those who suffer, the ones who are left behind.   We have become a society of spectators.   Some of us do extend a hand, some simply look away.  

The Information Superhighway Pushcart

I remember growing up in Manila without a Television.   My father had decided to buy us a bookshelf of Encyclopedia, as TV was portrayed as the bane of Filipino existence.  That didn’t stop me, as a boy, from watching TV from outside the window of our neighbor’s house.   I was always left out of conversations, especially as my young peers discussed the shows they had seen the night before.   In my private school, it was totally unimaginable that someone would not have a TV at home. 

What my neighbors didn’t know was how much letting me watch their TV meant to my young life.   As an educator in marginalized communities, I see the disempowerment of adult learners who have heard of the Internet, but have no idea what it means.   They talk amongs themselves on what it can do and what they can find there.   Some of the young women in my class thought it would be a good way to find a husband.   I’ve had Chinese students who wanted to access newspapers from their homelands.   Yet, for many of them, the Internet is still being delivered on a pushcart, while the rest of us are already speeding along the concrete superhighway. 

I don’t think my students are any different from me, as I wake up in the morning, press the On Button of my laptop, and idle to the kitchen to prepare my breakfast.    I see their lives taking similar shapes in the future, with Internet technology as a career pathway and a multipurpose room to address their many barriers to better opportunities.  

Technology these days has so many substructures.   The network of devices is appaling and confusing.  I gave my mother an Ipod for Christmas and realized she didn’t know how to download music from Itunes.   I gave her my laptop, but then she has yet to make the connection between the Ipod and her laptop.   Life is not so simple anymore.   The complexity of the Information Superhighway pushes many people to second, third classes of citizenry.   But I do believe, with more education, anyone can learn and access information.   It was such tenacity to learn that my Chinese students in Brooklyn found their Chinese newspapers on-line.   From there, they would ask, what else can this do?

Related Reading: F.C.C. Takes a Close Look at the Unwired (NYTimes)

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These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power…that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid. – Franklyn D. Roosevelt

One of my favorite books of recent years is The Bottom Billion by the economist  Paul Collier.    In the book, Collier zeroes in on fifty failing states in the country and “analyzes the causes of failure, pointing to a set of traps that snare these countries, including civil war, a dependence on the extraction and export of natural resources, and bad governance.”  This may not sound familiar to this generation of middle class Americans.    Most of us are so far off from the greatest generation of World War II that we don’t understand any longer what economic strategies built this country that guaranteed our absence in the world’s failed states.  

Having worked in the lowest rung of the economic ladder in the U.S., I see a lot of the same problems operating in the inability of the American poor to improve their lot, and advance.   Unfortunately, many of these people caught in the poverty traps are the traditional marginalized populations: blacks, urban poor, single mothers, and immigrants.    When big government decides to cut costs, they target social services  for radical budgetary slashes.   Yet, at what cost?  Education is getting worse, and jails are getting bigger, homelessness is invading the clean suburbs.   And we don’t make the connections readily.   The disenfranchised remain disposable.   As long as they are kept there.  (There where?)

Poverty in Numbers

The Bottom is the biggest part of the pyramid.    If history fails to remind us, we simply have to look at its shape to understand how much power there is in numbers.   If that is not scary enough, the bottom is now becoming a big hole where many in the middle class are slowly slipping into.   The media is full of personal stories about people losing their homes and their jobs and now living in tent communities (see this recent New York Times article about recent evictions in poor communities).   There are lines to food drives of people who had never thought they would end up there.    Economic recovery gets extended every month.   The leaders of this country are in some battle over rhetoric on how to save the American dream.  

We are faced with a huge challenge in America as the numbers at the bottom of the pyramid grows.   The middle class is slipping into the cracks.  Government is scrambling for solutions.   Big businesses are big businesses as usual.   CEOs are giving themselves huge severance packages for failing to run their companies.   America is returning to its pre-World War II shape, excavating deep divisions similar to the civil war era’s.  In all these goings-on in politics and the economy, the poor suffer most. 

Hand-outs

What many of us learned about Haiti is the absence of infrastructure for international aid.   Public outcry generated an an influx of millions for recovery and aid, with no organized system to distribute it.   We found out later that Haiti was a home base for thousands of international aid agencies for years, yet there was no organized system of cooperation and collaboration.  This is hardly old news, as Collier’s in his book, The Bottom Billion would find the same oppressive song sung in the other failed states.  

For many of us, the idea of helping poor people is likened to giving a dollar to a beggar on the subway.  It is a random act of giving.  There is no introspection of where that money would go.  We hope that the beggar get to eat, that the dollar travels far.  I asked myself the same questions during the four years I worked in the welfare system.   Once I was sucked into the system, was I helping to eradicate poverty or was I promoting it?  Was I stuffing the cushion of those who are receiving hand-outs with feathers so they don’t hit the pavement as hard?   Where does generosity of spirit cross the line of true action?

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{ We Speak America } will eventually be an internet-based workplace, vocational, and language-based portal for low-wage workers and immigrants.    I imagine an internet school that encompasses the four basic skills:  Listening, Reading, Writing, and Speaking.    The big chunk of work is getting to that place.    When I created the business plan for the organization, I recognize the enormous amount of research that I need to do in order to make this happen.   I also recognized the anti-immigrant climate in the U.S. that has resulted from the economic downturn.   In short, strategizing is key in creating the (dot) com product of the organization. 

I am calling the (dot) org a Think-tank; indeed, it is a thinking blog.    I am making it public to also sense the climate of support that may be available out there for this kind of effort.  My target population, the bottom of the pyramid, rarely gets any attention from the echelon of decision makers, but is always the first to pay when the economy turns topsy-turvy.   I consider myself as someone who got out of the bottom.  I grew up knowing that as long as I work hard enough, I can climb the pyramid.   In many ways, this is a personal voyage for me, a time for reaching out, and bringing others along to make a difference in the lives of those in the margins.  

I have opened the comment box, please feel free to write your thoughts.   Constructively, of course.   I respect your mind as I wish that you respect mine.    I am making my thoughts public to gather support from think-alikes out there who also believe in this effort.    As I construct this organization, I want to make sure that the different components are effectively put in place.    Obviously, there is much to gain in empowering the millions of people in this country who are trapped in the revolving doors of unemployment due to lack of education, training, and language skills.   I don’ t have to mention that this country is built on the backs of the immigrants who have come here.   Nothing has changed.

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Having visualized this organization for the past few years and having created a business plan around it at Harvard, I can see what it looks like at the end of this voyage.   Just like for many people who attempt to create organizations and enterprises, for me, the voyage itself is still a blur.  

Come 2010.  I enter a new era in life.   I have behind me over twelve years of experience in Adult Education, a graduate degree from a premium university, and a passion for a population that’s been highly ignored and neglected in American society: low-wage workers and low-skilled immigrants.   I have many role models in the arena of social entrepreneurship, and I have met many more during my term as a fellow in social entrepreneurship.   THey have many things in common, but one stood as the backbone of action against a constant barrage of discouraging forces:  PASSION.

The need to believe.  The need to take action.  The need to take that dream into something meaningful and life-changing.  The need to create and innovate.

So this year is the beginning of something new for me.   I will take my dream– {We Speak America} — to the next level.  Small steps.  Big dreams.

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