As New York State begins to implement new Welfare Reform legislation, the challenges for and demands on adult education will be even greater.

• Over half of adult welfare recipients do not have a high school diploma or the equivalent and more than 40 percent have limited literacy skills.
  
  
• Projections indicate that almost 50,000 recipients in our State have a disability and a large number are significantly impaired in obtaining work by disabilities resulting from alcohol and/or substance abuse.
  
  
• The new legislation requires all teen parents under age 20 who lack a high school diploma or equivalent to enroll in an approved program leading to a high school diploma or the equivalent.
  
  
• Citizenship preparation will also be in demand with as many as 200,000 legal immigrants losing eligibility for federal assistance.

The generic employability skills identified by the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) have been incorporated by the Board of Regents into the Career Development and Occupational Studies learning standards (CDOS). Both are provided as addenda in this guide. Supplemental adult education curriculum materials are under development to link the learning standards to citizenship preparation CDOS. These will be available at a later date.

The Craft of Teaching

Adult education practitioners face a tremendous challenge. They must fuse reality into the teaching and learning process to assure that all adult learners will perform at higher levels. This presents a wonderful opportunity for educators to really examine their instructional practice, to share what it is they do each day with their learners, to work in collaboration with other teachers and students and, thereby, to grow in their own understanding of the craft of teaching.

In his book, Teaching: Making Sense of an Uncertain Craft (Teachers College Press, 1992), Joseph McDonald states that:

“Real teaching . . . happens inside a wild triangle of relations – among teachers, students, subject – and all points of the triangle shift continuously.”