Learning about and embracing change and uncertainty are essential for responding to climate change. Creativity, critical reflection, and cogenerative inquiry can enhance adaptive capacity, or the ability to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to adverse future impacts. However, precisely how learning about change and its driving forces occurs and how experiences are combined with envisioned yet indefinite prospects of the future are poorly understood. We present two linked methodological tools—an assessment of drivers of change and participatory scenario building—used in a climate change adaptation project in Ghana and Tanzania (ALCCAR). We discuss opportunities and challenges of such iterative learning. Our findings suggest that joint exploration, diverse storylines, and deliberation help to expand community-based adaptation repertoires and to strike a balance between hopelessness and a tendency to idealize potential future realities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to extraordinary changes in family literacy instruction, forcing face-to-face programmes to shift rapidly (or “on the fly”) to online, remote instruction. This study is one of the few on online teaching and learning in family literacy and, to the knowledge of the authors, the first on emergency remote instruction in a family literacy programme during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article examines how the Goodling Institute for Research in Family Literacy at The Pennsylvania State University in the United States has responded to the pandemic by converting its face-to-face family literacy classes into emergency remote instruction using online platforms. Serving eight immigrant families in 2019–2020 who live in the State College area in central Pennsylvania, the Family Pathways programme includes adult education, parent education and interactive parent–child literacy activities. The article discusses how teachers created online learning opportunities for parents and children to learn together, the strategies and resources instructors used to teach remotely, how challenges such as discomfort with technology were addressed, and what has been learned from the experience. Although COVID-19 presents unprecedented challenges for educators and learners in family literacy programmes more broadly, it has also compelled instructors in this particular programme to use remote instruction creatively and has revealed the critical importance of family literacy programmes as an educational support system for low-income and immigrant families.

Previous research on digital storytelling (DST) has focused chiefly on children and youth, but we know little about how it is used in non-formal adult education. This article analyzes a DST class in rural Ireland, which was organized by a family literacy program and offered for parents at an elementary school. Data sources included fieldnotes, interviews, and digital stories by the parents who finished the class (n = 3). Janks's interdependence model of critical literacy is used to analyze how the class incorporated power, access, diversity, and design. The class did not engage in ideology critique or analyze the origins or consequences of dominant technologies, languages, and literacies (i.e., investigate power as domination). However, the class did provide access to technology knowledge and skills; affirm parents’ diverse knowledge, languages, life experiences, and identities; and equip participants to design and disseminate their digital stories. The study highlights possibilities for using multimodal composition in family learning and adult education.

This paper uses data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) to analyze the relationship between self-reported health (SRH) and literacy and numeracy proficiency for immigrants compared to U.S.-born respondents and for Hispanic versus Asian immigrants. The research questions were: (1) Are literacy and numeracy scores associated with adults’ SRH? (2) Are associations between SRH and literacy and numeracy proficiency moderated by immigrant status? (3) Among immigrants, are literacy and numeracy scores more strongly associated with SRH for Hispanics versus Asians? Immigrants had significantly lower literacy and numeracy scores, yet reported better health than U.S.-born respondents. Ordinal logistic regression analyses showed that literacy and numeracy were both positively related to SRH for immigrants and U.S.-born adults, and should therefore be viewed as part of the growing evidence that literacy is an independent and significant social determinant of health. Second, U.S.-born and immigrant adults accrued similarly positive health benefits from stronger literacy and numeracy skills. Third, although Hispanic immigrants were more disadvantaged than Asian immigrants on almost all socioeconomic characteristics and had significantly lower literacy and numeracy scores and worse SRH than Asian immigrants, both Hispanic and Asian immigrants experienced similar positive health returns from literacy and numeracy proficiency. These findings underscore the potential health benefits of providing adult basic education instruction, particularly for immigrants with the least formal schooling and fewest socioeconomic resources.

Based on ethnographic research in rural El Salvador and drawing on New Literacy Studies (NLS) and gender and development (GAD) literature, this article examines how participation in a Freirean-inspired literacy programme fostered and/or limited women's and men's personal, interpersonal and collective empowerment. The findings reveal that participation planted seeds of agency and generated numerous psychosocial benefits such as enhanced self-esteem and expansion of social networks, yet it did not lead to collective empowerment or increased gender equity. This suggests that literacy education is a necessary yet insufficient basis for ameliorating entrenched social and gender hierarchies. Nevertheless, the psycho-social benefits identified by learners enhanced their human capabilities, corresponded to needs rooted in the social context (e.g. postwar social fragmentation) and helped lay a foundation for future collective action. Additionally, the article attributes the programme's limited influence on women's and men's collective empowerment to both programmatic and contextual factors.

Although incarcerated individuals have committed potentially ‘immoral’ crimes, many are also parents, and need to foster their children’s moral development. As such, incarcerated parents occupy a paradoxical position: they are labelled as morally deviant yet simultaneously expected to provide moral guidance for their children. This study explores the concurrent rifts and junctures between incarceration, parenting, and morality by revealing how incarcerated fathers at a Pennsylvania state correctional institution (SCI) used a family literacy program to offer moral instruction to their young children. Moreover, it examines the seeming paradox of how incarcerated parents viewed as morally culpable seek to shape their children’s moral development while serving time for their own past actions. We find that although scholars and the public have historically perceived incarcerated individuals as lacking moral reasoning, there are multiple examples of incarcerated fathers acting as moral educators for their children.