TALKING TEACHING
Adult and Youth Literacies: Innovative Approaches and Promising Practices

An electronic conference on The Hub, December 2 – 18, 2004 [Held over January 17-31, 2005]: Join Heide Spruck Wrigley, a researcher in adult literacy who specializes in making connections between research and practice, to talk about innovative approaches and promising practices in adult and youth literacy.

The conference is offered free of charge and takes place in asynchronous time. All you need to participate is a web browser. A conference ID and password will be assigned to you when you register for the conference.

Registration deadline is November 30, 2004, 9 am Pacific time. Please register early as there is a maximum of 50 participants.

To register contact Sandy Middleton at Literacy BC: smiddleton@literacy.bc.ca.

When registering, please include the following information:

• Your first and last names.
• Your organizational affiliation and city/town of residence.
• A short paragraph that describes your work and your interest in the conference topic.

Adult and Youth Literacies: Innovative Approaches and Promising Practices
The focus of this session will be an exploration of issues in adult and youth literacy with a special emphasis on research-based principles to guide practice. We will discuss "what works" from various perspectives (theory, research, and classroom teaching) and will offer ideas and materials grounded in what we know about how people learn and how language and literacy develop. Subtopics will include discussions of 8-10 learning principles particular to language and literacy development in adults, definitions of what adult and youth literacy is (and what it is not), and ways of knowing what students know. Embedded throughout will be ideas and promising practices from the literacy field. These may include the use of generative materials to lessen preparation time, multi-media to increase engagement and build critical literacy, and "smart routines" to scaffold literacy performance. We will also discuss the research in "explicit teaching" (as opposed to "direct" teaching) and whether it constitutes a promise or a nightmare for adult literacy.

About Heide Spruck Wrigley
Heide Spruck Wrigley is a researcher in adult literacy who specializes in making connections between research and practice. Her international work includes working with teachers in China, Egypt, Germany, and Poland and she currently provides teacher education seminars through several of the new regional staff development centres in Texas (and no, supporting the Bush administration was not a requirement). Her research work includes several national studies in the United States around literacy for language minority adults, including a large scale five year current effort to study what happens when an explicit focus on literacy development is added to a life skills curriculum. Her work in Canada continues as the research director of the New School Canada, a national youth literacy demonstration program in Surrey, BC designed to show how adolescent literacy students who face multiple risk factors can be successful in school and transition to work, training, or non-sheltered academic programs. The two year research work has been completed and data analysis is now underway.

Heide holds a Ph.D. in education with a specialization in language, literacy, and learning and a Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics. She has written several books and numerous articles focused on different aspects of adult and youth literacy, including family literacy and workforce preparation. She is on a number of advisory boards, including the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL) at Harvard. She is currently serving on two three year panels for the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC where panel members examine issues, challenge current thinking, and contribute scientifically-based ideas related to (1) the U.S. national assessment on adult literacy (NAAL) and (2) the effort by the Department of Homeland Security to design a new U.S. citizenship test.

Heide loves teaching and working with teachers and wishes she had more time to just sit and think. As a tentative move in that direction, she and her partner Jim have just bought an old adobe house in the high desert (over 1000 metres high) of Southern New Mexico, in a small town called “Mesilla”. It’s a “project house” so she’ll be more likely to wield a hammer than a pen.

Heide has participated as the lead person in several on-line conferences and is looking forward to a lively discussion.

Adult and Youth Literacies: Innovative Approaches and Promising Practices is sponsored by Literacy BC and Capilano College in partnership with the Northwest Territories Literacy Council.