This newsletter, published five times a year, features articles on issues of concern to adult, family, and youth literacy practitioners, as well as recommended resources, announcements, and teaching strategies. This issue includes: (1) Career Pathways for High School Dropouts: A National Survey (Jon Steinberg); (2) Work (Elyse Barbell); (3) Peer…

Background: This article is concerned with professional learning within multi-agency settings. Since the publication of the government document "Every child matters" in 2003, professionals involved in working with children and young people have been moving into newly organized services that are required to deliver improved services for…

In this article, the author discusses a project that turns residents of some of South Leeds' most deprived neighbourhoods into community researchers and is giving people an opportunity to make concrete, positive changes to their communities. Armed with homemade tools, some coloured pens, and masses of post-it notes, the "Community…

This study uses data from a qualitative study of career pathway programs to investigate the incidence and type of organizational partnerships between employers, education and other agencies in workforce development. Findings demonstrate that education providers lead the partnerships, but that organizations divide into either peer to peer or…

This paper explores participation in social partnerships as a space for learning. It analyses interview data about participation in social partnership from partnerships involved in vocational education and training (VET) to argue that social partnerships constitute a form of learning space. Partnership participants engage in new learning through…

The Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) has, throughout its 50 years of existence, exercised leadership in the field of comparative education. It was one of the five societies that founded the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES) in 1970, an umbrella body that by 2006 brought together 35 national,…

The visual instruction section of the division of educational extension of the Bureau of Education has deposited in each of 35 distributing centers throughout the country an average of 113 reels of motion-picture film. In each of these centers these will be at once, or shortly, a part of a motion picture library. The technique of local…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe how Engestrom's "third generation" activity theory, with its emphasis on developing conceptual tools to understand dialogues, multiple perspectives and networks of interacting activity systems, has informed research into professional learning in multiagency service settings in England.…

Purpose: Strategic alliances generally represent inter-firm cooperative agreements aimed at achieving competitive advantage for the partners. In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in strategic alliances by multinational firms. This paper aims to explore the essence of these alliances and why they have become such a growing area of…

We examine collaborative efforts by employers to provide job training in rural areas and assess how this collaboration affects the willingness of employers to train workers. Data are drawn from a telephone survey conducted in 2001 of a stratified random sample of 1,590 nonmetropolitan firms in the U.S. The literature on job training suggests that…

This document includes comments on the adult provisions of the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), informed by research conducted with employers, employer organizations, and others on the strengths and weaknesses of the current workforce development system from the perspective of employers and low-wage, low-skill employees. Jobs for the Future is…

This article will discuss the establishment of a "partnership" of two State of Wisconsin regions (northern and western); thirty-four county human service agencies; the University of Wisconsin Department of Social Work; and the Continuing Education unit on the same campus: the Community-Based Services Training Partnership for Adults…

The Movement for Canadian Literacy (MCL) is a national non-profit organization representing literacy coalitions, organizations and individuals from every province and territory. Since 1978 MCL has worked to: (1) inform the federal government and the general public about issues related to adult literacy in Canada; (2) provide a national forum for…

The annual report of the U.S. Department of Education includes the Secretary of Education's report, and program-by-program analysis of the agency's principal operating components: the Office of the Secretary; the Office of the Under Secretary, including the Office of Management, the Office of Planning, Budget, and Evaluation, and the Office of…

The experiences of parents at home with their children have educational value when the experiences are backed up by understanding of what happens every day, by sound principles in approaching home problems, and by knowledge of good techniques of training children. The purposes of parent education work are to furnish parents with sound principles…