Literacy Live!

Empowering Speaker Series

Meeting with other ESOL professionals never fails to spark great ideas. During the Virginia Literacy Leadership Conference (VLLC), the AmeriCorps members attended a seminar presented by Brooke Hammond from Hogar Immigrant Services on Hogar’s Personal Empowerment Speaker Series. Hogar’s speaker series brings experts from different fields into the classroom to speak to the students about topics such as civil rights, banking, health literacy, and immigration. We thought it was a great idea to bring resources directly to the students, and we decided to start our own speaker series at the LCNV.

After surveying the students about topics of interest, we came up with a list of potential speakers. We decided to have the lectures on Tuesdays, in the half hour before both our morning and evening classes. So far on the schedule, we have had Jennifer Faddon from Fairfax County Public Schools speak about Advanced English Classes and Robert Rutland-Brown from Just Neighbors speak about immigration. Upcoming speakers include Kate Singleton, a social worker who will speak about health literacy, Sarah Moore from the Beacon Workforce Literacy Program who will speak about finding a job, and Daniel Quinn from Hogar Immigrant Services who will speak about civil rights.

So far we have met with a lot of interest from the students. On average, about twenty students attend both the morning and evening lectures. We hope to keep responding to students’ needs outside of the classroom by continuing the speaker series in the fall and beyond.

Thank you to Hogar Immigrant Services for their excellent idea, and thank you to the speakers who have made the Empowering Speaker Series a reality.

To view the Empowering Speaker Series pamphlet, click on this link: LCNV Speaker Series Flyer Summer ’11. If you or someone you know is interested in participating in the Speaker Series, please email Serife Turkol at learningcenters@lcnv.org

-Kerrin Epstein, Lead Teacher and AmeriCorps Member