Lucille T. Chagnon, M.Ed.

Community-based literacy has been Lucille Chagnon’s passion ever since she taught her ten-year-old adopted twin sons to read with six of Dr. Renee Fuller's ten Ball-Stick-Bird books.   Three months later, with Fuller's first books and minimal coaching from their Mom, they taught a six-year-old whose parents are blind.   When she was eight, all by herself she began to teach another six-year-old to read thos same books.

A one-time inner-city Principal and Teacher in five states, Lucille taught a three-credit Urban Literacy Practicum at Rutgers University’s Camden, NJ Campus for eight years and directed the Rutgers Urban Literacy Program through which hundreds of undergraduates from all majors tutored family members as well as children, youth, and adults through local schools, service agencies, and community programs.

Other literacy tutors that Lucille has trained include:

• Children, youth, and parents in two summer-long literacy programs in a south Camden housing development
• Third and 8th graders in remedial and special education programs
• Parents of Camden school children
• Teacher Mentors and Instructional Aides
• Special Education and Remedial Teachers
• AmeriCorps literacy tutors
• Teachers from juvenile institutions and a federal prison
• LVA-trained inmates at NJ State Prison, the state's maximum security facility

At Rutgers-Camden, Lucille taught learning-to-learn and writing strategies to under-prepared college students with the Educational Opportunity Fund (EOF) program for ten years. She also taught Developmental Reading for the Education Department and was a Curriculum Development Specialist in a Teaching Excellence Center joint venture with a Camden public school. She has taught open enrollment ABE and GED classes for the Camden Housing Authority and for Delaware Technical and Community College. In Philadelphia, she was on the staff of Drexel University’s state-funded Workforce Development Institute, and for five years she taught a graduate course in Career Counseling and Development at Temple University.

Lucille bagain doctoral-level work in Adult Literacy through the Fielding Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, under the mentorship of the late Malcolm Knowles.   She is the author of two other books:   Easy Reader, Learner, Writer, and Voice Hidden, Voice Heard: A Reading and Writing Anthology.