Acknowledgements

Learning for Life owes its existence to the late Ethel Matthews, chief of Pennsylvania Department of Education’s (PDE’s) Division of Adult and Community Education. Matthews initiated the Success Stories project and presented the first Adult Education Students-of-the-Year awards on February 4, 1978 at Pennsylvania’s 13th Annual Adult Education Midwinter Conference.

Some 20 years later, Cheryl Keenan, director of PDE’s Bureau of Adult Basic and Literacy Education (ABLE), recognized the research value inherent in the information about Pennsylvania’s outstanding adult learners that the Success Stories project had collected over the years and funded this study. Ella Morin, Division Chief Special Programs, PDE’s Bureau of ABLE, has been an ongoing source of encouragement and support for this study and its project director.

This study owes a debt of gratitude to research assistants, Pricilla Carman, Kathy Gleockner, Peggy Greene, Sam Gruber, Chris Kemp, Alice Redman, David Wolfe, and Joy Zamierowski who tracked down and contacted the 70 study participants, met with them wherever they chose, and encouraged their confidences. As an adult education administrator, director, author, and professional development specialist for 35 years, my credentials are in practice rather than research. I bring to this project the trained eye of a journalist and a firm foundation in qualitative research gained from studying with Steven Brookfield and Jack Mezirow as a graduate of Teacher’s College’s AEGIS program. The excellent work in adult basic and literacy education by Hal Beder, Beth Bingham, and Juliet Merrifield inspired me in researching and preparing this document. My partner in this adventure, Dr. Richard Gacka, and my friends in the field, Paul Jurmo, Renee Sherman, and Tom Valentine who critiqued this report have been firm taskmasters. Any mistakes are my own.

The future of our field is in the hands of adult learners like those who gave life to this study as research assistants and as participants. It is their stories and their achievements over time that validate our endeavors as adult education tutors, teachers, trainers, counselors, supervisors, curriculum and professional development specialists, researchers, directors and administrators.