Welcome and Please Introduce Yourself!

Dear Friends & Colleagues,

My name is John Corcoran and I am honored to join you on this forum. I believe that in America today, it is as important to teach adults as it is to teach children.

I learned to read at the age of 48 after going to a local library Adult Learning Center, taking a battery of diagnostic assessments and then receiving the research-based instructional methodology needed to teach me how to read. For the past 25 years, I have been advocating for literacy across the nation with the mission of preventing and eliminating illiteracy by teaching both children and adults to read. It is never too late to learn to read.

I look forward to continuing the conversation with all of you.

At your service,

John Corcoran

Oceanside, CA

www.johncorcoranfoundation.org

It is with great pleasure that I join this LINCS Science discussion list as “subject matter expert”.  Though that is my title as coordinator of this discussion, I consider as experts all practitioners who work with adult learners in the teaching and learning of science, math, and use of technology.  This discussion format will allow us to learn from one another as we explore ways in which to incorporate science topics in classroom teaching and tutoring situations.

 My background includes teaching adult basic education/adult secondary education in Oregon’s community college system through the state Office of Community College and Workforce Development.  I have also worked with practitioners at the local, state, regional, and national levels to develop ways in which Internet-based resources can be incorporated into the adult basic education curriculum.  My work in this area started in 1993, and led to my coordination of the earlier version of LINCS Science and Numeracy Special Collection of online resources.  Now these resources are known as Open Education Resources (OERs).  If you are unfamiliar with this term, it is defined by the Department of Education as “ digital teaching and learning materials of all types, including text, videos, games, and assessments that are freely available and adaptable for use in any educational setting for all types of learners.”

 My specific interest and experience is in using topics/concepts in science as the context for teaching and learning a variety of skills: critical reading, numeracy, and writing.  For example, science abounds with charts, graphs, and maps; these allow practice in reading essential (and interesting) information in these formats while learning about other subjects.  I had a great opportunity to broaden this interest in 2002 when I joined a team of scientists at Palmer Station, Antarctica for almost eight weeks.  The resulting web-based lessons and materials included the ways in which scientists and support staff used math in their lives and work in that remote environment.  More recently, a team of us in Oregon developed a year-long professional development project for Oregon adult education teachers.  This on-going project is a collaborative venture with ocean scientists and science educators, designed to address global topics such as climate change, aquatic invasive species, plate tectonics, and ocean currents and weather.

 I look forward to many valuable discussions as we use this group to investigate topics and teaching strategies.

Dear One and All:

We human beings are so interesting.  I've been thinking about posting an introduction to the Science group for weeks and, for some reason (that is not clear to me), this is the day!

First, I want to say that I absolutely love science, especially earth science.  That said, I primarily work with frontline health care workers -- working online --  as they test the waters before trying a challenging community college health career program.  The students are wonderful.  I find that they are very interested in health-related science (general biology/human anatomy and physiology) but are pretty anxious when it comes to the nuts and bolts (e.g., atoms, molecules, pH, etc.). Many are older students who didn't take much in the way of science in high school. Others are English language learners who are working on academic and science vocabulary. There are lots of activities online that help.

For this introduction, rather than start would with a big science issue that concerns me (How about that 2014 GED Science Test Item Sampler?), I thought I would ask others on the list about their favorite small idea...that small activity or example that you get lots of mileage out of.  One of my favorites is the "How Big Are Things" cube that I found online several years ago.  I send it to students...I have one on my desk (which was recently "borrowed" by colleague...):

http://www.vendian.org/howbig/cube/

I find it particularly helpful for students that are not familiar with the metric system. Just examining it is a lesson in itself.

What do you think?  Got a big or small science idea you could share with your introduction?

Cynthia Zafft

National College Transition Network at World Education in Boston

Hello Everyone,

I just joined the group and want to say hello and introduce myself. For years my work has been developing and promoting resources for health literacy, but my original training is in exercise physiology. I am excited to connect with more science-lovers like myself in this community!

I have tought ESOL and ABE and integrated health literacy into the curricula, so my experience with adult learners and science has been related to health science. I have also developed and taught an online health science course (with Cynthia Zafft, see above!) for recent GED holders who are applying to community college programs to become CNAs, medical assistants or nurses. I believe that efforts like this bring both science education and health literacy into an important arena of job readiness. Health care jobs are available and will likely expand with the new demands of the Affordable Care Act. This will require good science teaching and health literacy at all levels of education, and I hope that we as a group can help make this happen!

I look forward to hearing from you all about your experience teaching science in adult education!

Julie

Hi everyone,

My name is Pat Garrison and I joined the LINCS community yesterday and have signed up for most of the discussion fora, I think.  In December I completed a Master of Arts in Adult Education at University of South Florida and am hoping to develop a career in the area of adult basic education. The program at USF is a great program, however during the year and a half that I was a student there were no courses offered in ABE.  Last semester I volunteered / interned at a local homeless mission, learning about adult educational assessment among residents there.  In 2005-2006 I taught 6th and 7th grade (physical and life science) at a very high poverty Title I middle school in South Carolina through the state's program for alternative certification. Prior to that I assisted with two semesters of forensic chemistry at a local community college. And I have worked one-on-one with an adult learner working to hone her reading and math skills.  But my experience as a teacher or instructor is -- I feel -- somewhat minimal (With the MA in Adult Ed I believe that I have a solid foundation to work from now).

Currently I work as resource coordinator for a small private mental health practice, and as my employer hopes to retire in the next couple of years, I hope to be able to transition into a career more directly related to adult education in the next few months.

For a few years I lived in a rural, low-income community in the SC foothills and this -- among other things -- has really provided some impetus towards wanting to work in the field of adult ed. 

I thought I would join the science forum since I have taught science (albeit to children / adolescents) and have some academic and working background in science. Prior to teaching middle school science I worked for about four years as an analyst in a forensics lab (involved more chemistry -- which I love -- than biology, thankfully...). My undergraduate degree is in biology.

I think that science is relatable to most everything, day to day.  I think it is one of the many good tools for helping cultivate critical thinking and in expanding our understanding of the world.  I would like to learn more about how it fits into the GED and adult high school... I left high school after 11th grade to go to college, and though I remained in college to graduate, after the first miserable semester I wanted to drop out, so, having no high school diploma, I took the GED. I don't remember much about it, and I was not ever in GED classes. There is so much I want to learn, and feel that I need to learn, about adult basic ed / transitional learning, etc., and it looks like LINCS members have LOTS of experience, so I am here to learn from everyone.