RICHARD DARVILLE

I thought a bit last night, and I thought a bit this morning and I seem to have three things all of which begin with "A". One is appreciation, one is an affirmation, and one is an ambition.

The appreciation I have is for the kind of work that is going on here, which I found quite exciting, quite stimulating, quite heartening. I was glad to see the heart on the evaluation sheet. The word that came to me to sum up my experience and observation of it was, trust. What has surprised me and struck me and moved me here is trust in a couple of senses. One is those of us who are from different kinds of locations, both geographically and within the community of people who are interested in research and practice. We can trust each other to sit down around a table together and talk. My sense was that generally everybody could trust that everybody else around that table would listen seriously and question seriously and try seriously to understand. The other half of the trust thing that has really struck me fits with what Barb was saying. I'm seeing more trust in our own knowledge. As Barb was saying,"You know stuff, right?" We all know stuff. But there's also questions that academics actually wonder about at times - whether we know things that are really reliable and can be depended upon and you can just trust your instincts and say things. That's been my experience and it's been immensely gratifying.

The affirmation is for the kind of work that I see going on here, which is really affirming the knowledge that exists in, is developed in, and grows out of practice. Which is undeniably the centre of what's going on here. There really are particular kinds of knowledge that are grounded in the places where we organize programs and deal with particular students and try and help people with reading and writing and try to grapple with the other range of issues in people's lives that connect to their learning literacy. That knowledge has a very particular character and very particular strengths. And it is to be valued, it is to be celebrated, it is to be held onto as the centre of an enterprise that we're in the middle of growing and developing here. And so that's the affirmation: to hang on to both the trust that there's real knowledge grounded there and to the sense that this is a project that has value and needs to be sustained and quite explicitly recognized in those terms.

The ambition is a sense that there's really an open end to what we are involved in or an open horizon that we haven't really figured out how to deal with. I certainly haven't figured out how to deal with it. It's the question about how the knowledge that's grounded in practice and that's developing and building out of what we do here can shape policy. It's something we touched on in multiple workshops and discussions that I've been part of but it's never been really elaborated. My sense is that's probably a project of years, not of hours or days. Everything we do here is shaped within policy. It exists within policy in the sense that there are public processes and political processes and governmental processes that are promoting adult literacy work and that are funding adult literacy work. And it's those that enable almost all of us to be here. It's created a certain kind of space for us to do this sort of work that we are involved in. But on the other hand almost all of the discussions about practitioner research that are going on here really point to aspects of the work that policy tends not to pay a lot of attention to. Policy largely says, "What's important is that people increase their skill levels because they will be more flexible and increase our national economic competitiveness." But there hasn't been a lot of talk about increases in skill levels or national competitiveness at this session. We tend to draw attention to things that this policy talk doesn't usually draw attention to. You know, to say "Well, if somebody comes to the door of a program and has a positive encounter with somebody who is there, that is a positive outcome and it counts. It counts in reality even if it doesn't count in policy." Or today, "There are questions of violence that really impinge on people's capacity to learn and the ways that people learn." That's important in reality and in practice, if it isn't important in policy. So my sense about the open edge of all this is that we need to find ways of developing and elaborating and systematizing this discussion about practitioner research that can actually build it into the ways that policy is thought about, so that we are not on the edges or doing something that feels slightly illegitimate and we constantly have to ask, "Can I get funding for that or would I be allowed to do that?" But something about which policy will actually say, "Yeah, those are also crucial parts of the work that need to be recognized."