Volunteer programs, especially those for docents, may often be overlooked as learning opportunities rather than as a strategy for program delivery. Thinking about docents first as learners themselves, and then as partners in creating learning experiences for visitors, can create a meaningful shift in the relationship. By integrating concepts from…

The purpose of this instrumental, multisite case study is to examine fidelity, adaptation, and differentiation challenges found at Wood Badge, a nationwide Boy Scouts of America training for adult volunteer leaders. Our iterative analysis of more than 900 pages of fieldnotes and 400 pages of documents revealed facilitators often explicitly taught…

Volunteer-based organizations are dependent on volunteers to meet the goals of the organization. Identifying and training volunteers as leaders of the organization is one way to increase positive social change in their community. However, there is limited literature investigating the outcomes of providing leadership training to volunteers. This…

Workplace experiences are central to adults' learning and development, providing opportunities for significant and valuable lifelong learning. Research into adults' learning in volunteer work attests to its significance and value across the spectrum of adult learning, serving instrumental, social, and altruistic purposes for the learner and…

The Adult Tutoring Program within the Literacy Center of West Michigan has been running monthly professional developments (PDs) (known as tutor in-services) for volunteer tutors since early 2021. All in-services fit into at least one of the categories of strategies, life skills, civics, next steps, or digital literacy. The team has been able to…

This article conveys one practitioner's career-long journey related to teaching reading. The author gained valuable information from relevant research reports regarding the keys to effective reading instruction and has learned even more while implementing a systematic approach to teaching reading as a volunteer tutor.

This study explores the learning of volunteer end of life caregivers (EOLCG). Using the profound learning framework, the researchers will use a grounded theory approach to generate transferable characterizations of how learning occurs for EOLCGs and what the content of that learning is. As a unique population of adult learners who perform an…

This dissertation describes the literate practices and layered technological strategies writers utilize in creating professional documents, particularly the literate activities, interaction with technologies and multimodal texts of senior writers in a workplace where many types of texts are produced and distributed as participants plan, manage,…

Informal learning experiences can provide valuable visitor-to-staff interactions that require skilled staff--often volunteers--to adjust to the needs of each visitor group. These experiences are often less regimented to provide increased flexibility for both the museum and the volunteer, allowing for more diversity of volunteer support. This…

Adult ESL is a high-turnover field, and volunteers are a critical component of the adult ESL workforce. Existing research focuses on learners' experience in the classroom. There is limited attention to how teachers might change as a result of encountering immigrant learners in adult ESL. The purpose of this study was to understand the informal and…

At Fontana Adult School, they saw a need to create a strong, unified student group on campus to help them not only promote their school and the services they offer the community, but also to improve their school climate and understand student needs better. At the end of 2018, they created a student leadership team on their campus, and it has made…

Shawnee State University (SSU) founded Project BEAR: Building Emerging and Achieving Readers, an AmeriCorps program, to support literacy development and improve school readiness in the Appalachian region. After the first 2 years of program implementation, areas for growth including enhanced service member recruitment, member onboarding, and…

Participating in activities such as being involved in school life and practicing leadership skills are as important for immigrant learners as studying English. We surveyed 33 student volunteers and analyzed testimonies of nine staff members to investigate how English as a second language (ESL) student volunteers' engagement and leadership…

'Working with you all and finding my voice as an educator has changed my life', one of the retirees said as we were discussing their experiences as museum volunteers. When I was given a two-year contract as a museum educator to contribute to the renewal of a maritime museum in Norway by designing and developing a broad ranging outreach programme,…

The Wisconsin Master Gardener Program team used the Google+ Community platform to provide an engaging online discussion forum for asynchronous continuing education experiences. Applications of such a tool for volunteer online education have numerous benefits, including the capacity for asynchronous posting, ease of posting, privacy options, wide…