By Sybil Schlesinger, LVA Literacy Unlimited, Framingham Public Library
Summary
I am the Program Coordinator for LVA Literacy Unlimited, an affiliate of Literacy Volunteers of America. Our program provides one-to-one tutoring for adults, aged 16 and over, who live in the MetroWest area of Massachusetts. We train volunteers to teach basic reading, writing, computation and/or English language skills for speakers of other languages. There are currently just over 230 pairs of tutors and students learning together. Once a year we have a Tutor/Student Recognition Evening to celebrate the program's anniversary and the achievements of our tutors and students. Since the tutors recognize homebuying as a goal their students would like to achieve, I assumed that a homebuying curriculum would be of interest to both our tutors and students.
In my role as Coordinator of the program, I designed and implemented three trainings, two of which were for other LVA coordinators across Massachusetts and the third training which was for tutors in my own program.
Training 1: Literacy Volunteers of Massachusetts' Affiliates Meeting
I took the FannieMae Foundation's ESOL and ABE curricula and the ALRI homebuying readiness materials to the Literacy Volunteers of Massachusetts affiliates meeting on Friday, February 26th in Auburn, Massachusetts at that city's public library. There are 12 affiliates spread across Massachusetts in Boston, Fitchburg, Framingham (our affiliate, LVA Unlimited), Lowell, Norwood, Orange/Athol, Palmer, Pittsfield, Quincy, Southbridge, South Hadley, and Worcester. The coordinators of each of these programs meet in Auburn every other month. As part of the scheduled agenda at the February 26th meeting, I passed out the teacher's guide and students’ workbooks for both the ESOL and ABE curricula. As a group, we went through the table of contents. Then I spent time discussing the levels of the two books, suggesting that given our students' capabilities, it actually might be more useful to use the ESOL curriculum for our basic literacy and beginning ESOL students, and the ABE curriculum for our GED and advanced ESOL students. We compared the difference between the two workbooks looking, page by page, at the initial chapter, "Do you want to buy a house?"
I also discussed the value of using the homebuying curriculum to teach financial literacy. Teaching financial literacy was of particular interest to the coordinators across the state and the ability to offer a workbook that students could own-- as opposed to the Xeroxed copies of workbooks that they normally must use-- was also appealing.
I discussed the soft second mortgage program, a state-provided tool for lowering the cost of homebuying for low-income families, and the state-provided workshops on homebuying offered across the state. We also discussed the options of having bank officers run a workshop for tutors and students on mortgages and establishing credit, the possibility of having students who bought their own homes run a workshop, and the possibility of having state officers come in to discuss tools for helping low-income families buy homes.
Finally, I presented some other agencies as resources such as A Better Chance for Development (ABCD) and other Community Action Programs (CAPs) across the state, The Boston Home Center run by the Boston City Mayor's Office, the Boston Oil Consumer Alliance, Massachusetts Immigration and Refugee Advocacy (MIRA), the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance (MAHA), and the Massachusetts Bar Association.
I also shared a list of useful Web sites such as http:www.realtor.com, which provides a listing of homes on the market by geographic location, http://www.homebuyinguide.org a helpful FannieMae site meant to walk potential buyers through the process of homebuying.
By the end of the meeting, each coordinator had at least five books to take back to his/her site: the FannieMae Foundations' ESOL and ABE teacher's guide and students workbooks, and Where the Sun Breezes Don't Stop Shining, the result of the ALRI's 1998's Homebuying Readiness Project, a rich resource filled with student and teacher writings as well as a thorough listing of homebuying and community agencies.
Training 2: LVA Literacy Unlimited
I ran a more in-depth homebuying readiness workshop for my own tutors
on Tuesday, May 11th. I presented the same information that
I had presented to my colleagues at the Literacy Volunteers of Massachusetts
affiliates meeting in February, but instead of simply comparing the initial
chapters on homebuying, the tutors and students present broke up into pairs
and each worked on a method to present one of the first four lessons in
Unit One. This hands-on activity was well received. Each pair presented
their lesson to the group. This gave the tutors and students ample time
to discover what the guides had to offer and the opportunity to share teaching
ideas and methods with other tutors.
Training 3: Literacy Volunteers of Massachusetts' Annual Conference
Because the LVA Literacy Unlimited training was so successful, I decided
to adopt the same model for the Literacy Volunteers of Massachusetts' Annual
Conference on June 5th. It went over just as well, and I expect to continue
to offer these homebuying workshops each year for my affiliates and perhaps
the annual conferences as well.
Reflections
Because of the nature of our one-to-one tutoring programs, we are still at the curriculum dissemination stage. We do not yet have many student writings to collect, Nor can I determine at this point how many students will be reached by the FannieMae Foundation/ALRI homebuying readiness materials. However, the advantage to a program like ours as opposed to the standard adult classroom is that the students who are introduced to the materials have articulated homebuying as one of their goals. Also, by offering the homebuying curriculum to Literacy Volunteers of America programs, there is the promise for a wide distribution of the materials.
I think that the FanneMae homebuying curricula, together with the ALRI materials and homebuying readiness teacher-trainings, are useful tools for literacy programs such as ours. We are always looking for materials to use with our students which are directly relevant to the goals they wish to achieve, and these homebuying materials qualify. As mentioned above, the ESOL curriculum seemed to work well with our basic literacy/basic ESOL students, while the ABE curriculum seemed to work best with our GED and advanced ESOL students, so that rather than designating one curriculum "Literacy and Basic Education", and the other "English as a Second Language for Adults," it might be more useful to label the workbooks according to skills levels, i.e. Homebuying Readiness Level 1, and Homebuying Readiness Level 2.
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