Using Partnerships to Overcome Barriers

About This Session

Summary

Real adult educators across the state of Texas have been sharing barriers that their learners face to achieving their learning goals. Come learn how AEL programs in Texas are bridging across organizations to overcome student barriers to learning.

What are the pros and cons of partnering?

How can you make partnerships work for your program and your learners?

What we'll cover:

My desire to share these experiences with the AEL community came from moderating the AEL instructors’ Community of Practice on TCALL’s PD Portal and seeing a lot of the same barriers across the state. I hope to focus this forum on overcoming barriers such as childcare, work scheduling conflicts, mental health, disposition, and other retention issues.

I’m currently contacting folks across the state who are known to have good partnerships between grant-funded AEL programs and community-based organizations.

Participants will walk away with real-world examples of partnerships that have overcome barriers to learning by working together. In conversations I’ve had with grant-funded programs across the state, I’ve observed a bit of a defeated attitude about partnerships due to previous experiences and mismanagement of past partnerships.

Many of these programs will look at partnerships between CBOs and think “that’s great for them, but it won’t work for us because of the grant, the college, the town, or what have you.” I’m hoping that the forum will provide examples of solutions to these common barriers: childcare, work scheduling conflicts, mental health, disposition, and retention problems.