IDEAL Institute

A Senior Fellow at the National Skills Coalition, Amanda Bergson-Shilcock leads the organization’s work on adult education and workforce policies to expand opportunities for US-born and immigrant adults. Throughout her career, Amanda has worked with state and federal policymakers and skills advocates to develop policy solutions that address the challenges facing adult learners and jobseekers, including immigrant workers.

We would like to recognize Amanda’s recent work focused on digital equity. Over the past several years, Amanda has authored highly relevant and accessible publications that have helped adult education providers and others in the workforce education field amplify the critical need to support digital literacy of adult immigrant workforce and adult learners who have experienced gaps in their prior formal education.

Her policy expertise, insights, and commentary have also been cited and published in local and national media outlets, including TIME, Fortune, BBC News, Inside Higher Ed, POLITICO, Business Insider, and The Wall Street Journal.

Dr. Stephen Reder is Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics at Portland State University. He is the author of numerous publications on adult literacy, second language acquisition, and digital literacy. He has served as principal investigator for numerous large research projects on adult literacy development, second language acquisition, digital literacy, and lifelong learning.

This body of work over his professional career has and continues to inform professional development and policy that shapes distance and digital education — in the US and abroad. Specifically, it’s important to note the Longitudinal Study of Adult Learners (LSAL) – This nine year study following nearly 1000 adults ages 18-44 who, at the time of screening, had not finished or were not currently enrolled in high school, gotten a GED, or were learning English is one of the few longitudinal studies of this population of learners.

As we’ve read it, the LSAL findings led to a groundbreaking National Software Demonstration project that produced the Learner Web – which itself was the focus of study on use of technology to keep learners connected to education and supports and led to other work – namely the Broadband Technology Opportunities (BTOP) initiative that started in 2011. This led to early work that we have very directly built on in IDEAL including crowdsourced resources to support instruction, digital literacy curricula, and of course important policy at various levels informed by BTOP findings and to incredibly useful papers published as part of the OECD’s PIAAC work.