Announcement!

WE LEARN collaborates with NELRC
to create a special issue of
The Change Agent: Adult Education for Social Justice.

WE LEARN	The New England Literacy Resource Center	WORLD EDUCATION
This issue is now available.	Background	Goals of the Project

The Change Agent Theme: Women and Literacy Adult Learners and Educators: We are looking for student writings, lessons, activities and reflections addressing the theme of women and literacy. Questions for students and teachers to think about: How does being a woman affect your education? What are literacy issues for women? How is literacy defined for women? What do you think women's literacy means? What important social/political issues affect women adult learners? How are those issues connected to literacy and women's access to basic education? Do learners have access to information on women's issues? How? What happens when gender issues come up in class or in a tutoring session? How do you use women-centered materials in your classes? What does feminism mean to you?   To order this issue, contact: Interim Editor Cynthia Peters World Education 44 Farnsworth St. Boston, MA 02210 Phone: 617-482-9485 fax: 617-482-0617 Email: angela_orlando@worlded.org   We appreciate the generosity of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation in funding this isssue. www.nmefdn.org

 

What IS The Change Agent?

This biannual, theme-based publication inspires and enables teachers and learners to make civic participation and social justice part of their teaching and learning. Begun in 1995 as a tool for organizing the adult basic education community against radical funding cuts, this flexible and creative tool for educational development helps people become informed and active members of their local and global communities. Soliciting writings by teaching staff and learners, it is a forum for investigative and expressive writing including news articles, opinion pieces, classroom activities, poems, cartoons, interviews, project descriptions, and printed and web-based resources. Each issue focuses on a different, timely topic relevant to adults lives, (e.g. health, economic literacy, environment, housing, changing workplace, media literacy). For more information and back issues, visit The Change Agent website.

 

WE LEARN Goals for this project

This project will help address two essential objectives of WE LEARN:
1) filling a need for women-centered literacy materials that currently do not exist; and
2) growing our organizational constituency.

WE LEARN has partnered with The Change Agent for this one special issue to provide an opportunity and platform to elevate and deepen the discussion among women learners and literacy workers about barriers to education and how education and literacy can transform women's lives. This forum not only will address critical issues around women’s literacy but also make connections to how these issues relate to the many forms of personal and institutional oppression women have historically and continue to experience.

Publishing, like education, is not neutral. The lack of readable and empowering materials for women with limited proficiencies continues to keep women learners – who are most often women of color, poor, single moms and otherwise disenfranchised and disempowered – from fully participating in determining how best to create social change affecting their lives. Creating this issue of The Change Agent not only provides opportunities for adult women learners and educators to write on these issues but to then use this publication in a myriad of ways: as a teaching/learning tool and forum for discussion and reflection; as a basis from which to create change in their learning center and communities; as a tool to educate members of the general population about literacy issues for women.

Through recruitment of an editorial board of diverse constituents and solicitation and support of student writing, the project will bring more inclusion of and attention to the voices of women learners who have little or no forum for their words, opinions, and ideas. This issue will also share the WE LEARN vision, invite broad participation, and highlight the resources already collected by WE LEARN. In these ways, a woman and literacy issue of The Change Agent will provide an important tool for addressing women's issues in literacy and adult basic education classrooms as well as provide additional accessible reading for women learners—composed largely of their own words and writings. We also will promote this issue to other individuals (activists, community groups, social service providers) as a way to broaden the visibility and discourse of women's literacy issues.

Secondly, we view the effort to recruit editors and solicit writings and participation in this issue of The Change Agent as an effort to increase our own organizing base among women learners and literacy practitioners. Additionally, we expect this issue of The Change Agent to become a basis for the WE LEARN instructional workshops offered in the future by staff, board and constituents.

For more information about WE LEARN's collaboration with The Change Agent, please contact Mev Miller.

For more information about The Change Agent, please contact Angela Orlando or Silja Kallenbach.

 

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