HOLYOKE – Boston nonprofit Mass Literacy has awarded Pesha Black, director of Holyoke Community College’s (HCC) Ludlow Area Adult Learning Center with the Mass Literacy Champions Award for her work with immigrants learning English.
The Mass Literacy Champions award “publicly recognizes and rewards Massachusetts educators who have shown exceptional commitment and results through their work in literacy education,” the organization said in a press release.
There are six awardees for 2016, all from different parts of the state.
The award includes a $1,000 grant and Mass Literacy will also pay to make a “professionally produced video” introducing Black, which the organization says is worth up to another $1,000. Black plans to use the grant money to develop a new program, which Mass Literacy calls an “innovative literacy project,” aimed at training multilingual youth to be professional translators.
Black, whose current work mainly involves teaching adult immigrants, said in an interview, “It’s really amazing to work with adults who are willing to spend their very limited time learning a language.”
Speaking about the new program she hopes to create, Black said that she’s sure there are “plenty of people in Western Mass. with the linguistic skill” to become translators one day. And with any luck, she hopes other educators will join her to stretch the grant money as far as possible.
According to Black, learning English is all but essential to getting a job in the United States. She cited an example of a Syrian immigrant who was a dentist in his home country, but needed to know English and take a CPR course in order to continue that work here.
Her program helped him to do that, and he was able to get a job “almost on the spot.”
“That sort of encapsulates what we’re about,” she said.
In a country where being from an immigrant family can be a burden, she added, the question for her new program is “how do we really help them to see that this is a strength that they bring?”
Black says that she expects her role will be to act as a bridge between Mass Literacy and her own work.
“This fits into a larger direction around thinking, ‘how can we integrate education with training,’” she said.
Learn more: http://www.massliteracy.org
Contact Gazette correspondent Isaac Burke at iburke@umass.edu.