In developing their CTL programs, the five colleges:

• Integrated developmental (basic skills) and academic content
• Developed new curricular materials and professional development for CTL faculty.
• Maintained links with employers and industry associations.
• Found resources to fund the programs, at least in the short-term.

The authors state that, “While none of these colleges profiled in this study have been able to serve more than 20% of their developmental, English as a Second Language (ESL) and adult education population, they all seek the resources and capacity to go to scale.”

6. Globalization and Functional Context Education. Within developing nations, moving into the world marketplace and benefiting from its economy requires that illiterate and poorly literate adults receive literacy and education at the beginning literacy, post-literacy and lifelong learning stages if they are to develop sustainable literacy skills and volumes of knowledge that will permit them to utilize the worldwide communications technologies that are so rapidly changing the distribution of information and knowledge underlying new economies.

Following Functional Context Education principles, which call for integrating basic skills education with important content area knowledge and skills, more rapid progress can be made in achieving sustainable development than is typical of sequential programs in which basic skills are first raised to some assumed necessary level before the adult can obtain the education and training needed. Functional Context Principles can be applied to sustainable development activities such as:

1. education on microenterprise development so adults can learn how to become entrepreneurs and economically self-sufficient,
2. job skills training so that displaced workers in unskilled jobs can be efficiently cross-trained into better paying jobs that do not suffer from outsourcing;
3. financial literacy so that once employment at a self-sufficiency level is achieved adults can be better consumers in various domains and manage their money better so they can begin to invest in wealth accrual,
4. health literacy so that individuals and families can take better care of themselves and access affordable, competent medical care;
5. workplace literacy so that employed and under employed workers can acquire skills for upward mobility or transfer into better paying jobs.

For more on globalization see resources online at
http://econ.worldbank.org/prr/subpage.php?sp=2477

For more on Functional Context Education and sustainable, economically self-sufficient education and training for underserved adults see Wider Opportunities for Women’s (WOW) Family Economic Self-Sufficiency Project online at http://www.wowonline.org

Functional Context Education (FCE): An Evidence-Based Approach to Adult Literacy Education Integrating Professional Wisdom With Scientific Evidence

In 2002, Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, Director of the U.S. Government’s Institute of Education Sciences, defined evidence-based education as: “the integration of professional wisdom with the best available empirical evidence in making decisions about how to deliver instruction.” He went on to define professional wisdom as “the judgment that individuals acquire through experience” and “consensus views.” He noted that “Increased professional wisdom is reflected in numerous ways, including the effective identification and incorporation of local circumstances into instruction.”