AAACE 2021 Annual Conference

literacy, poverty, community, learning

With poverty in the Mid Mon Valley (Pittsburgh, PA) experiencing 25% to 40%, low adult literacy levels, and elevated crime rates, adult and community education need to be reimagined. The Learning Cities initiative is a global program seeking to revitalize and affirm learning in families and communities.

Using the Mid Mon Valley, just southeast of Pittsburgh, as an example, the Learning Cities initiative will be discussed as an integrative grassroots effort to address low adult literacy and poverty. The key Mid Mon Valley cities were once thriving steel towns until their collapse in the early 1980s and have never fully recovered despite myriad funding and programming. Further, over the last twenty years, poverty and adult literacy have continued to worsen. The Learning City initiative reimagines community capacity building through improving adult and community literacy in collaboration with the people who the programs directly serve. The initiative mobilizes differences and hybridity expansive learning for thinking beyond the walls of traditional educational institutions and infrastructures to identify, celebrate, and confirm learning in all its rich and robust formats. With increasing diversity and immigration, decreasing governmental funding, and declining program registrations, disenfranchised and vulnerable adults, families, and communities are suffering. Especially when considering the changing expectations of adults with globalized economies and rapidly advancing technology, both families and communities must be recognized as valid learning sites. Learning needs to be recognized as transferring from the individual to the community and acknowledge differences as a key learning driver for lifelong learning.