Far West Area Representative Candidates
Elizabeth "Liz" Moya
"Liz" Moya
With more than 20 years of experience in the field of adult education, Liz Moya has worked as an assistant director, PD Coordinator, curriculum specialist, teacher, student coach, tester, project manager, data specialist, course designer, conference organizer, and professional developer. For the past year, she has worked at Texas A&M as a TRAIN PD Center Specialist. In this role, she oversees, develops, and delivers professional development in the areas of program management, educational leadership, digital literacy, and planning for program continuous improvement. She is also a policy guidance reviewer for TWC. In 2019, Liz represented TWC and TRAIN PD for the Skilled Immigrant Integration Protocal (SIIP) Project in Toronto, Canada and nationally for statewide updates. Throughout her career, Liz has worked with adult learners in various academic settings and with different learning needs. However, her passion centers on educating about social justice and empowering students to be a better version of who they think they are. Despite the challenges during the course of her adolescence and early college years, those combined experiences along with her students’ examples of persistence inform her philosophy of education and approach to teaching and training. Liz is a ProLiteracy Nationally Certified Manager in Program Management. She earned her BA in Psychology from the University of Texas at El Paso and her M.Ed. in Adult Education and Training from the School of Education and Human Resource Studies at Colorado State University. She has been a TALAE and COABE member where she represented the FarWest Adult Education Consortium since 2018. In this role, she was the first to propose hosting Regional TALAE serving close to 300 adult educators in an area that is otherwise greatly underserved at state conferences. As a result of organizing the Regional TALAE Conferences in El Paso, several new trainings were introduced statewide, such as Google Classroom, AEL Assessment Training, and Math for the Low ABE Learner; new mentor teachers were identified to participate in Trainer-of-Trainer events; TWC AEL State Director, Anson Green, added El Paso as a regional stakeholder event location due to high attendance participation at Regional TALAE Conferences; and the regional conference planning of El Paso was replicated by other AEL programs across the state to host their own regional conference. In addition to serving as the FarWest TALAE Representative, Liz devoted her time to planning and preparing for the TALAE Conferences of 2019 and 2020. She was part of the Awards Committee and assisted with creating the conference at-a-glance, pd stickers, and pd sticker sheets. Liz has also presented for TALAE over the years on various topics receiving high evaluation scores in all of her sessions.
Mike Saenez
Mike Saenez
My name is Michael Saenz. I am an Adult Education teacher at Socorro ISD Community Education. I have been teaching adults for fifteen years. Courses that I have taught have been ESL classes from beginners to advanced, HSE in English and Spanish, Transitions to College, Career & College Exploration, Basic Computer literacy and others. I have written curriculum for our program and trained new teachers as well as offered Professional Development for veteran teachers. I have trained and presented at the Far West Adult Education Consortium (FWAEC) level as well as the TALAE and COABE conferences in topics ranging from Standards 2.0 to researched based practices in adult education. I am a statewide trainer for Texas Center for the Advancement of Literacy and Learning (TCALL). I have been a member of the Texas Association for Literacy and Adult Education for more than ten years. I have brought what have learned at the TALAE conferences into the classroom and shared with other teachers in my program. I have also nominated students for TALAE awards and I also won the TALAE Teacher of the Year award. I believe that I will represent the organization well in my duties as a Far West Area Representative. I also strongly believe in TALAE’s mission and purpose of the organization of “The quality of adult education in Texas will improve only as the competencies and qualifications of teachers and directors are improved.”