History of IAL

The International Alliance for Learning was founded in 1976 as SALT (The Society for Accelerated Learning and Teaching). SALT’s founders were professors at the University of Iowa (Don Schuster and Charles Gritton, among others) who had met Dr. Georgi Lozanove in Bulgaria. There they learned about his Suggestopedia method of learning second languages.

Dr. Lozanov’s work so inspired them that they began synthesizing his work, gathering related publications and doing their own research. Schuster, Gritton, and the other founders also began offering summer conferences to share their knowledge and excitement for Suggestopedia. They continued to maintain sporadic contact with Dr. Lozanov, in spite of the closed nature of Bulgaria society during the Cold War period.

In 1979, Dr. Lozanov was finally able to visit the United States. He delivered weeklong training on his Suggestopedia techniques at the California home of Bobbi DePorter (a future International Alliance for Learning Board President). The training was a success and furthered accelerated development in the United States. The Bulgarian government made continued contact with Dr. Lozanov difficult. This inaccessibility forced SALT members to broaden the scope of the organization to include a wider range of methodologies that impact learning including NLP, learning styles theories, multiple intelligences and more. Additionally, some SALT members wanted to explore other non-traditional teaching and training approaches. SALT conference content during this time period broadened and become more inclusive. The conference audiences also expanded to include corporate trainers.

Over time, as the organization became more inclusive, the SALT name became less representative. To reflect this evolving reality, SALT changed its name to the International Alliance for Learning (IAL) at the 1994 SALT St. Louis conference. A number of other changes were enacted as well, including moving the conference location, its timing, and the tracks offered to more effectively represent the variety of IAL practitioners, including Language teaching, Corporate, and Education (K-12) professionals.

These changes ushered in a golden era of conference attendance during the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, even as membership declined in response to the economic challenges and the events of 9-11-2001.

Today, IAL is again on the move. We are revitalizing as an organization to meet the learning challenges of the future. Now more than ever, learners everywhere need Accelerated Learning. It is the key, especially in an era of reduced training and learning investment, to business success, on-the-job performance and teaching effectiveness. And, at a time when advances in technology and social media make communications and knowledge-sharing easier, IAL is the ideal resource for Accelerated Learning practitioners worldwide.

As we did in 1994, IAL welcomes the future. We are aggressively developing new ways of producing conferences, building local and national communities of practice and aligning the latest learning research with tools, tips, and techniques for learning professionals worldwide. We invite you to join us as we energize IAL for the sake of your organizations, your learners, and your own learning self.