Since graduating from CIE, Judy Hofer has spent her entire professional career immersed in literacy education. As a fresh graduate, she ran the Ware Adult Education Center, a site of The Literacy Project, where she started a lifelong journey of addressing the impacts of violence and trauma on learning, especially on women. To this day these first students remain her inspiration for having taken such personal risk in naming the violence they experienced and creating a video to encourage others to get support and speak out.

During the 1990s in western Mass, Judy transitioned to work on state, regional and national efforts with World Education and the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy. She worked with great colleagues - including CIE graduates Marla Solomon, Marilyn gillespie and Cristine Smith - in studying effective approaches for adult education teacher professional development, building networks of practitioners intent on connecting research and practice, creating nationally accepted standards for what adults need to be able to know and do in the 21st century, and co-authoring a sourcebook on promising practices learned from addressing issues of violence in adult education programs.

Since 2000 Judy has lived in Taos, New Mexico, where she has been intent on seeing if “she is worth her salt” by meeting the challenge of creating effective and transformative adult education programs in a state rich in diversity, beauty, and talent yet encumbered by the highest poverty and teen suicide rates in the nation.

For 15 of these years, Judy was the Director of what is now called the Taos Education and Career Center, an adult education school within UNM-Taos that consistently ranks as the top performing program in the state and in 2019 won the Institute for Educational Leadership’s National Adult Education Career Pathways design challenge. She also directed a statewide, practitioner-led professional development initiative for creating excellence in the field of adult education. Her proudest moment was being recognized by her community in 2012 as an Unsung Hero for having made a positive difference in her hometown, where it matters to her the most.

Judy recently retired (2019) and while immensely enjoying this time to be outdoors and reflect, she wonders how long she will last before re-engaging. [5-20]

Email: JudyKHofer@gmail.com