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An estimated one-fifth of adults in the United States possess low literacy skills, which includes minimal proficiency in reading and difficulty processing contextual information. One way to study reading behavior of adults with low literacy is through eye movement studies; however, these investigations have been generally limited. Thus, the present study collected eye movement data (e.g., gaze duration, total time, regressions) from adult literacy learners while they read sentences to investigate online reading behavior. We manipulated the lexical ambiguity of the target words, context strength, and context location in the sentences. The role of vocabulary depth, which refers to the deeper understanding of a word in one's vocabulary, was also examined. Results show that adult literacy learners spent more total time reading ambiguous words compared to control words and vocabulary depth was significantly correlated with processing of lexically ambiguous words. Participants with higher depth scores were more sensitive to the complexity of ambiguous words and more effective at utilizing context compared to those with lower depth scores, which is reflected by more total time reading ambiguous words when more informative context was available and more regressions made to the target word by participants with higher depth scores. Overall, there is evidence to demonstrate the benefits of context use in lexical processing, as well as adult learners' sensitivity to changes in lexical ambiguity.

Although some of the issues facing adult literacy students are multifarious and answers may seem out of reach, it is important for practitioners of adult literacy programs to initiate strategies and explore viable options that address persistence. The purpose of this discussion is to share best practices of a large adult literacy program and identify elements of the Western Suffolk Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) Respect and Integrity for Student Excellence (R.I.S.E.) Student Ambassador Program that have improved student persistence and community involvement for adult literacy students. Student Ambassador roles and responsibilities for the Adult Literacy Program include educating new students about agency policies and procedures, conducting tours, supporting new students in classes, participating in peer educational activities, translating, supporting student social events, and offering ongoing feedback toward program improvement. In addition to increased self-esteem, improved English language skills, leadership development, and peer assistance, student ambassadors demonstrate increased persistence and enjoy motivating their peers to do the same.

I argue that local adult literacy programming involves consciousness and praxis that obscures and renders invisible the social relations of race and ethnicity, and a key mechanism that enacts these processes in Canada are the Essential Skills Framework. Race and ethnicity, as social relations, have both a muted and active presence in the experiences of learners and adult literacy workers engaged in transitions to further education and work. However, the ideology within local program activities like registration, assessment, and goal development show the treatment of race and ethnicity as separate from issues of work and economy, giving it an invisible presence that can reproduce racialised divisions of labour. The Essential Skills are an important tool in these local processes that impact racialised, ethnic, and migrant communities. Ultimately, adult learners build a praxis of self-identifying with the same racialised division of labour that organises their arrival and participation in Essential Skills-based training and vocational learning.

Stuttering is a disorder that affects about 1% of the population and manifests as speech disfluencies. Reading difficulties and disabilities are commonly found in this population. Nonetheless, speech disfluencies have not been explored in adult struggling readers (ASRs). In the current study, we examined the rate of stuttering in ASRs as well as the relationships between their speech fluency and reading skills. A total of 120 participants were interviewed about their experiences with reading and administered standardized reading and reading-related assessments. Speech fluency and the criterion for stuttering were based on the interview. About 18.3% of the sample met the criterion for stuttering. ASRs who stutter (ASRs-S) and ASRs who do not stutter (ASRs-NS) did not differ in their reading and reading-related skills. ASRs-S had higher rates of negative correlations between reading and reading-related skills compared with ASRs-NS. Correlation patterns between performance on standardized assessments point to higher rates of uneven skills or dissociations in ASRs-S. These findings may have implications for the assessment and instruction for ASRs. [For the corresponding grantee submission, see ED620471.]

Comprehension monitoring is a meta-cognitive skill that is defined as the ability to self-evaluate one's comprehension of text. Although it is known that struggling adult readers are poor at monitoring their comprehension, additional research is needed to understand the mechanisms underlying comprehension monitoring and their role in reading comprehension in this population. This study used a comprehension monitoring task with struggling adult readers, which included online eye movements (reread and regression path durations) and an offline verbal protocol (oral explanations of key information). We examined whether eye movements predicted accuracy on the passages' reading comprehension questions, a norm-referenced reading assessment, and an offline verbal protocol after controlling for age and traditional component skills (i.e., decoding, oral language, working memory). Regression path duration uniquely predicted accuracy on the questions; however, decoding and oral vocabulary were the most salient predictors of the norm-referenced reading comprehension measure. Regression path duration also predicted the offline verbal protocol, such that those who exhibited longer regression path duration were also better at explaining key information. These results contribute to the literature regarding struggling adults' reading component skills, eye movement behaviors involved in processing connected text, and future considerations in assessing comprehension monitoring.

Australia's natural environment poses challenges for human inhabitants and will continue to pose novel challenges in an era of climate change. However, the resources that people can access to respond to climate change are diverse and unequally distributed. While this suggests a role for education, especially for those who are most socially and economically vulnerable, integrating climate change literacy into educational programs is not straightforward in all sectors. Studies have shown that increased standardization of curricula constrain teacher autonomy and pose dilemmas for teachers faced with tensions between curricular requirements and their professional judgment about appropriate pedagogy and curricula. This article considers the possibility of educational intervention for socially and economically disadvantaged adults with limited English language and literacy skills by investigating how a group of teachers in accredited literacy courses viewed their role in addressing climate change and environmental literacy in their literacy classes.

This theoretical article reflects on a recent development in adult literacy studies: transnational adoptees relearning their heritage languages. Literacy and adoption scholars have studied the replacement of the heritage language with a second language and reported it as a permanent loss. Returning to the country of origin, return adoptees challenge such notion by relearning the heritage language as part of their homecoming. We explore how this heritage language relearning could be seen as a renegotiation of the language hierarchies between the adoptive community and the community of origin of languages in the relationship between the adoptive region and the region of origin. Building on Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak's "Enabling Violation" concept, we deploy a postcolonial perspective on understanding heritage language relearning in transnational adoptees. We discuss how language relearning can challenge and reproduce the asymmetrical relation between adoptees' position in the Global North and their first families in the Global South. We argue that heritage language relearning can open the door for adoptees to engage with transnational literacy, carving out global learning trajectories and reconnecting their adoptive and first world. The last section of this article discusses adoption organisations' dialectic response to this shift by partaking in the organisation of heritage language classes for adoptees. We argue that adult education centres and literacy educators can play a pivotal role in further institutionalising these heritage language classes for transnational adoptees.

This qualitative case study presents an investigation on how three adult literacy educators in community-based teaching contexts are using anti-deficit, culturally relevant and critical practices to engage racialised women in learning processes that counter colonial epistemology. These educators work in Ontario, Canada where policy around adult literacy education prioritises learning for employment in ways that reinforce colonial epistemology by reducing the value of human and environment to serve economic growth. Despite the political-economic contexts that structure adult literacy programming, these educators' practices engage racialised women in resources and practices that challenge colonial world views and its reproduction as the normative social practice. An analysis of these educators' practice raises insights into how decolonising pedagogy can be further theorised to speak to the significance of agency in the education process of racialised women and the educator's role as an agent of autonomy.

The roles of literacy skills in improving the livelihood of individuals have been extensively researched, but little is known about their impact on the lives of persons with disabilities. This qualitative case study tried to explore people with physical disabilities' beliefs about literacy skills' contributions to their livelihood and how these determine the commitment to pursuing literacy skills. To gather data, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions were used. The study's findings indicated that respondents believed literacy skills could potentially improve their livelihood. As a result of their beliefs, their strive to become literate was imperative.

Despite rapid advances, modeling a variety of instructional designs to support variations in teaching and learning during the design of educational technologies is still an open challenge. In this paper, we propose a patterns based approach for the design of educational technologies to address this challenge. This is in contrast with existing literature that focuses either on patterns in education or in software, and not both. The core idea of our approach is to leverage patterns for modeling instructional design knowledge and to connect it with patterns in software architecture. We discuss different categories of patterns in instructional design. We then present the notion of "Pattern-Oriented Instructional Design" (POID) as a way to model instructional design as a connection of patterns ("ProcessPattern, ContentPattern") and integrate it with "Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture" (POSA) based on fundamental principles in software engineering. We demonstrate our approach through adult literacy case study (287 million learners, 22 Indian Languages and a variety of instructional designs). The results of our approach (both web and mobile versions) are available at http://rice.iiit.ac.in and were transferred to "National Literacy Mission Authority of Government of India: for further proliferation.

Adult literacy and literacy education have long been a global agenda. China's literacy education has been developing amid the backdrop of international commitments and goals of adult literacy. Since the founding of new China in 1949, adult literacy policy in China has been continuously evolved within the changing political, economic and social background, and has made great success in illiteracy reduction. By tracing the up-up-plateau-transformation processes of adult literacy policy in China, this paper reports that the policy focus is shifted from political ideology, economic growth, personal development to a mixture of the three currently although the policy influence is declining after 2011. China's success in anti-illiteracy in the past seven decades might be duplicable for other parts of the world that are still facing the adult illiteracy problem.

Adopting the methods of multimodal conversation analysis, this study demonstrates that adult second language (L2) users with emergent literacy formulate requests as 'complex multimodal Gestalts' consisting prototypically of deictic or depictive gestures combined with gaze, situationally relevant material, and vocal or linguistic resources. The data obtained for this study are from classroom interactions and out-of-class service encounters that were conducted as part of pedagogical tasks in the context of integration training for adult L2 students with emergent literacy. The analysis shows how co-constructed request sequences typically involve multimodal negotiation in which the co-participants support L2 users to formulate requests that are understandable and that contribute to the progressivity of the interaction. The findings contribute to an understanding of practical requests as multimodal, context-sensitive, collaborative actions and underline the importance of this perspective especially from the view of L2 users with emergent literacy.

The adult learning ecology has expanded to include digital access, requiring enhancement of theories in the specific context of low-literate learners who may not have previously benefited from educational technology. The Digital Learning Ecology (DLE) framework identifies the three dimensions of context, design, and motivation, considering theories of cognitive learning, multimedia design, and language learning ecology that help support low-literate adults. A mobile learning solution based on DLE, designed for the Barbara Bush Foundation XPRIZE Adult Literacy competition, is described. The app design utilizes context proximal to adult learners' lives to motivate and maintain active engagement, improve multiple literacies, foster engagement, and encourage persistence. DLE dimensions are mapped to specific features of the app, along with the underlying cognitive principles that support learning. Both internal evaluations by authors and external evaluations by XPRIZE demonstrate significant improvement in learning outcomes for low-literate adults. Further, many low-literate adults in this study demonstrated low digital literacy, indicating a design need for a more accessible user interface with enhanced signifiers compared to those provided by universal design principles. Carefully designed mobile solutions based on the DLE framework can enhance and expand the learning ecology for low-literate adults, supporting both formal and non-formal learning environments.

Inferencing skills uniquely contribute to the reading comprehension skills of older grade-school and college students. Evidence also suggests that children's reading component skills, such as decoding and language comprehension, differentially contribute to various reading comprehension assessments. However, additional research is needed to investigate the complex relations of foundational reading skills and inferencing skills to sentence-level and passage-level reading comprehension assessments with struggling adult readers. This study examined the relations between struggling adult readers' (N = 125) text-based (decoding, fluency), language based (morphological awareness, vocabulary, language comprehension), and inferencing skills. The indirect effects of language-based reading component skills to sentence-level and passage-level reading comprehension measures through inferencing were also examined. Vocabulary and morphological awareness indirectly predicted passage-level reading comprehension through inferencing. Word reading fluency and vocabulary knowledge uniquely predicted sentence-level comprehension whereas inferencing skills predicted passage-level comprehension. These results suggest that inferencing is an important contributor to the reading comprehension skills of struggling adult readers. These findings also emphasize a need for multiple measures of comprehension to understand the complexity and underlying component processes involved in struggling adults' reading comprehension skills. Educational implications for adult literacy programs are discussed.

In the summer of 1978, at Church Teachers' College in Mandeville, Jamaica, a class of advanced students participating in the Jamaica Movement for the Advancement of Literacy (JAMAL) wrote, cast, rehearsed, and performed a play that satirized several major institutions--the family, the church, and the business sector--as well as class and gender relations. This essay locates this nearly forgotten event in the context of the opportunities JAMAL offered for decolonizing knowledge and activism for poor and working-class Jamaicans. The reactions the play provoked on the micro and macro levels help to explain JAMAL's subsequent trajectory, which follows the broader trajectory of the conflicting visions for the purposes of adult education in Jamaica's pre- and post-Independence era: from the efforts of Jamaica Welfare starting in the 1930s through active decolonization in the 1970s, through global and local institutional neglect in the 1980s, to contemporary insertion into the neo-liberal global economy. Recovering this instance of popular education and performance illuminates both gaps in the historical record and possible foundations for reinvention in the 21st Century.

The importance of professional development to the success of adult education cannot be emphasized enough. In a field with many part-time educators, and where recruitment and retention of adult educators is an ongoing challenge, professional development plays a critical role in attracting, retaining, and developing teachers, administrators, and support staff. The Literacy Information and Communication System (LINCS) provides resources to support and advance these professional development efforts. This article shares the five-factor model for change through effective professional development and how LINCS implements this model to bring effective professional development to the field through the LINCS components.

This reflection essay reports on a book reading inquiry circle (BRIC) on Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by English as a second language (ESL) faculty from a college located in the Greater Seattle area. Since professional development is usually not provided for ESL faculty in basic skills programs due to lack of funding at the institutional level, the instructors involved in this BRIC engaged in critical language pedagogy as professional development on a divisional level for an 11-week quarter. The ESL faculty engaged in robust conversations about issues regarding adult literacy. The goal of this group was to determine how a culturally responsive curriculum for adult basic skills students could be curated through deep critical reflections and active dialogues through Freirean philosophy of the oppressor and oppressed. The faculty involved in this BRIC shared their reflections on critical pedagogy, as well as culturally responsive teaching, and how it is reflected in their praxis. The BRIC created opportunities for colleagues to share what they are teaching in the classroom and would allow instructors in our division to include different perspectives and research practices to create culturally relevant curriculum for immigrant, refugee, and nontraditional students in basic skills programs.

The Adult Tutoring Program within the Literacy Center of West Michigan has been running monthly professional developments (PDs) (known as tutor in-services) for volunteer tutors since early 2021. All in-services fit into at least one of the categories of strategies, life skills, civics, next steps, or digital literacy. The team has been able to take full advantage of flexible delivery methods, including in-person, online, and hybrid meetings, with varying days and times each month. As a result, the in-services yield 10-15 participants on average. Frequent and flexible PDs also enable the team to evaluate the gaps in current services, as well as identify and invite community partners to collaborate. In comparison to an exclusively in-person and staff-run model prior to the pandemic, the current model allows the program to adapt to the changes of learner demographics, strengthen the bond between the tutor and the learner, and better serve their learning goals. As the program supports tutors to work with adult learners in a one-on-one setting, it is crucial that tutors feel supported and that their knowledge is updated to support learners' goals.

The Association of Adult Literacy Professional Developers (AALPD) provides an avenue for networking of professional developers in the field of adult education. In the early years, the organization established three priorities related to professional development: (1) professional development standards, (2) research, and (3) funding. In 2006, the association identified the development of quality standards. These standards can be used by state leadership to set a vision for professional development by professional developers as a guide for design and delivery, and by practitioners to help them understand the characteristics of effective professional development. Through AALPD's collaboration with COABE and the National Association of State Directors of Adult Education (NASDAE), the organization hopes to support the advocacy efforts in progress to increase funding for professional development. This article provides information on the organization's origination, professional development standards, and current collaboration.

Based on research completed between 2018 and 2022 in the Republic of Ireland, this article examines how the distinctive ethos and relational pedagogy of adult literacy education have been impacted by broader changes in the field and wider society, with significant impact on its capacity to support learners. The learner-centred ethos, ways of working and webs of relationality between literacy learners and staff are increasingly squeezed by rising pressures from the broader socio-political context which promotes a neoliberal view of education for individual improvement and employability. Drawing on Freirean critical education and relational pedagogy, the consequences of this are considered in the three interconnected themes of i) the learner-centred ethos in adult literacy, ii) learner identities and relationships of learning, iii) creative and responsive pedagogies of literacy.

This scoping review of research explores the use of educational technologies for adult literacy, specifically for those with low literacy skills. The sample explores research published since 2010 across four major databases, yielding 21 relevant peer-reviewed articles published through the end of 2020. Half of the final included studies were conducted in North America (12 in US and 1 in Canada), and 8 were conducted in other countries around the world. Technology interventions ranged greatly across 15 separate interventions identified, allowing for little to no comparison. Methodologies and quality ranged significantly, with data mining, descriptive surveys, and quasi-experimental designs as the most predominant methods. Instructional strategies ranged greatly as well, from gamification to practice to direct instruction to word highlights. Among the included studies, there is one educational technology that has been studied extensively enough to suggest readiness for scalable implementation and randomized control trials along with promising early results from other interventions. Findings from the scoping review indicate that establishing a research agenda and community in this space, along with future studies detailing participant literacy levels and instructional design features with greater precision, as well as explicitly corresponding design to literacy skills, are significant ways in which educational technology researchers and developers could further the work on this important educational problem.

Globally, literacy can be conceived of in different ways. Two perspectives that have influenced adult literacy policy internationally are the economic functionalist and the sociocultural. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Maori educators have repeatedly advanced a matauranga Maori perspective of literacy. This perspective has parallels with the embodied, practice-based multiliteracies and sociomateriality of the sociocultural perspective but less so with the dominant functionalist perspective. To address how Maori views have been side-lined in adult literacy policy development, we seek to clarify this view and foreground Maori-led policy recommendations that date back to the creation of the New Zealand Adult Literacy Strategy in 2001. We also highlight the relevance of this perspective by sharing the success and effectiveness of Maori-led adult literacy programmes. In doing so, we demonstrate the need for a biliteracy approach to adult literacy policy to reflect our bicultural nation and ensure Maori aspirations for literacy are met.

Functional literacy is the learning of knowledge and skills for vital necessities as a higher level of basic literacy and then the operational use of this information in individual, socio-cultural, or economic fields. This research aims to examine the opinions of teachers in the context of functional literacy related to the II level primary education program for adults conducted in Public Education Centres. A phenomenological design was used in the study. A total of 12 teachers working in literacy courses in Public Education Centres were included in the study group. This study was conducted by taking the opinions of teachers and concluded that the second-level literacy courses are not sufficient at the social, individual, and educational levels in the context of functional literacy. In the context of these results, it is recommended that the content of the II level primary education program is reconstructed to provide functional skills in a framework that enriches daily life practices focused on the needs of adult individuals.

Previous studies have documented the personal transformation that many low literate adults undergo when they engage in literacy campaigns. In particular, research has captured how improved literacy leads to a greater willingness and capacity to speak out, or what is often referred to as voice. This paper focusses on the impact of an adult Aboriginal literacy campaign on those responsible for implementing it. Through the words of these 'maestras', we reveal how the teachers and trainers of the campaign, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, experience a similar trajectory of transformation to the literacy students. This transformation, we argue, is the result of the pedagogic relationship between students, local campaign staff and national trainers. This dialectical relationship in which teacher is learner and learner teacher is at the heart of the literacy campaign model and is part of what Giroux (1988) characterises as a radical theory of literacy and voice. We further argue that the impacts of the literacy campaign at the individual and collective levels and crucially, the sustainability of these impacts depend largely on this pedagogic relationship and the new, shared understanding of the world which results.

This article discusses the contributions of foreign-born TESOL instructors helping adult language learners develop literacy skills through a pen pal project, which lasted 10 weeks and consisted of writing letters back and forth weekly. The project provided adult immigrant learners with an opportunity to practice meaningful writing to support their English literacy development. The research questions include (1) how do foreign-born TESOL instructors support adult immigrant learners develop literacy through a pen pal project? and (2) what components of the pen pal project promote the development of civic literacy skills? Data for this article come from 159 letters product of the writing exchange between instructors and learners, and individual conversational interviews with the instructors. Study findings are presented through four themes: teachers as cultural informants, emotional connection, life and learning advice, and adult ESL learners' linguistic competence. Study findings add to the body of literature focusing on the powerful contributions of foreign-born TESOL instructors to the education and language-culture acquisition of adult immigrant English learners.

Background: Despite increased enrolments at primary schools in Zambia, more than half of the children in Grades 1-4 are unable to meet the required minimum standards for literacy. Aim: The study set out to examine the effects of using a phone-based mobile literacy game (Graphogame) to improve literacy skills in children and adults in rural family settings. Setting: The study was conducted in the Katete District, a rural town in the eastern province of Zambia. Methods: Participants were 73 Grade 2 learners (52% boys, mean age 9 years and 48% girls, mean age 10 years) and 37 parents (mean age 36 years). Three literacy tests, measuring letter-sound identification, phonological awareness, spelling competence and word recognition, were administered to both the children and parents. Parents also reported on their level of education, familiarity with smart phone use, availability of home reading materials and home literacy activities. Results: The findings showed that children who were exposed to the Graphogame performed better than the control group on all literacy measures. Furthermore, parent's performance on the tests improved after the intervention. Conclusion: The findings suggest that technology can improve literacy skills in both children and adults in rural areas of Zambia.

In the 20 years since the implementation of the Work Investment Act (WIA), federal funding for adult literacy education has remained largely stagnant, and actually decreased in inflation-adjusted dollars from FY2001-FY2019, despite the fact that the field serves fewer than 5% of those in need. Yet over these two decades, the field has moved away from identifying itself as part of the broader struggle for human rights and social justice. The author contends that for those working with and in marginalized, exploited, and under-resourced communities, programs must be fully and explicitly aligned with the grassroots movements for racial, social, and economic justice that are working to dismantle systemic inequities. [For Part 1, "A Lifelong and Life-Wide Framework for Adult Literacy Education," see EJ1249006. For "Examining the Role of Federal Adult Education Funding in Adult Literacy Education. Forum: Broadening the Lens on Adult Literacy Education Outcomes. Literacy Education Outcomes [Part 2 of 3," see EJ1249056.]

Adult basic education's role, from the beginning, has been about serving people with foundational skill needs. The author, Judy Mortrude, agrees with the argument that adult literacy education needs to be repositioned within a new framework of lifelong and life-wide learning, a framework in which new policies are formulated, programs are designed and evaluated, and research is funded and carried out. She also thinks it is helpful to examine the role of federal adult education funding inside the lifelong and life-wide educational framework as both a way to value federally funded adult education programs and services and a way to imagine the "other" funds, programs, and services needed to provide for skills needs across the length and breadth of life. [For Part 1, "A Lifelong and Life-Wide Framework for Adult Literacy Education," see EJ1249006.]

As the largest funder of adult basic education (ABE) in the nation, providing over $600 million through its Basic Grants to States (U.S. Department of Education, 2019), the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) drives ABE policies and practices. In a review of the announcement on Title II, the phrase "transition to" is repeated 46 times throughout the document and is clarified with language that brings the importance of transitions to the forefront. Basic skills learners attend classes not as an end, but rather as a point that takes them forward to something else. While WIOA-funded ABE can support parenting development, civic engagement, and other ancillary outcomes, transitions for economic impact provides a significant focus. Basic skills have become primarily about "transitioning" to benefit learners' career and economic needs, and the nation has come to a point where "transitioning" forms a basis for how it offers basic skills for adult learners. The authors ask if a focus on transition out of basic skills is wrong. After all, in expending the relatively few dollars that federal and state budgets provide for adult education, should the nation not seek to look at the most impact for those dollars? Moreover, is economic impact a serious enough need to focus those resources? The compelling arguments suggested by these questions are considered in this article.

In this forum, Stephen Reder argues that adult literacy education needs to be repositioned within a new framework of lifelong and life-wide learning, a framework in which new policies are formulated, programs are designed and evaluated, and research is funded and carried out. To appreciate how much this suggested framework differs from the neoliberal framework in which adult education is currently embedded, it is worth considering briefly how neoliberalism has gained its foothold in (some would say its stranglehold on) adult education.

This paper outlines the scale of the adult literacy and numeracy issue in New Zealand and describes a policy intervention designed to upskill employees in workplaces to help resolve the issue for them. This is the Workplace Literacy and Numeracy (WLN) Fund, which enables around 7000 employees a year to complete a 25- to 80-hour learning programme, usually in their workplace and during work time. The paper also describes what happens in workplaces while programmes are underway, and the short-term wellbeing, social, and economic outcomes that occur for individual employees. In this context, literacy and numeracy relates to the way in which adults use skills that involve reading, writing, speaking, listening, and mathematics in everyday life. It also includes digital skills in relation to how adults engage and interact with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). These skills are those that individuals need for learning, life, and work in the 21st Century.

Over the past century in the U.S., stronger parental involvement in children's education has been encouraged and, more recently, codified into state teaching standards. Despite this, fully engaging parents as equal and respected partners has remained elusive. The quest seems particularly perplexing when attempting to enhance participation of immigrant parents who are emergent bi/multilingual learners (EBLs). To foster their enhanced engagement, strong collaborative partnerships among families, schools, and communities are essential. One way of doing so is by first reflecting on any existing institutionalized barriers or internalized biases that could be thwarting fuller participation, then creating school- and community-based activities where school personnel, immigrant families, and other families in the community can come together, work collaboratively, and share resources, capital, and cultural wealth. In addition to sharing resources in mutually beneficial ways, the goal of these collaborations is to promote trust, understanding, and empathy by getting to know one another on a personal level. This essay is grounded in Epstein's theory of overlapping spheres of influence (1995) and the Community Cultural Wealth Model (Yosso, 2006) and proposes a variety of collaborative endeavors--from professional development events for school personnel to intergenerational bilingual classes to community fairs in the schools--to build relationships and engage immigrant parents with the public schools. Modifying the proposed activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact is also addressed.

This article reviews the adult literacy campaign in the 1970s in the United Kingdom (UK) and the influence of Paulo Freire's thinking on how we worked. We argue that much adult literacy provision had been designed to 'domesticate' rather than 'liberate'. The mid-1970s 'Right to Read' campaign in the UK rejected this approach (BAS, 1974). The use by tutors of the language and the experience of learners led in part to the publication of student writing, creating reading materials and approaches that were different, and challenging to existing power structures. Emancipatory adult literacy work could not withstand the arrival of substantial government funding in 2001, which brought a new Skills for Life government strategy, together with new teacher-training, new standards and literacy qualifications. Also, in the 1970s and 1980s progressive educators and the institutions for whom they worked developed initiatives which focused on underrepresented and marginalised groups, asking 'who isn't there, and what can be done about it?' The result was a renewed development of outreach work, better understanding of what helps and hinders participation, and improved progression routes for individuals. One aspect of this development flowed directly from the literacy work in the 1970s--the participation of volunteers as 'fellow learners'. Looking at educational work with older people in care homes, volunteers from among local university students acted as co-learners in a charity which illustrates Putnam's (2000, p.134) 'generalised reciprocity'. We consider how Freire's legacy emerges among voluntary action as much as it does in literacy programmes