Possible activities include: 

• community mapping
• family literacy surveys
• literacy logs (where, when, with whom, what, why, in what language do you use literacy skills)
• family trees
• interview grids
• discovering generative themes

 In other words, you can use a seemingly neutral tool to "mine the issues". We divided into groups and each group tried out one of these tools.

The final discussion covered the following:

• Points of resistance (authoritarian contexts, peer pressure to maintain the status quo, fear of imposing an agenda)
• We need to build in an understanding of the difference between personal and social problems: what can I/we do to address this?
• Often, institutions and employers have a narrow definition of literacy. We need to work together to expand the definition to include social change.
• Social change pedagogy can include looking at the literacy skills we need to accomplish the range of tasks in our lives as they link to systems (e.g. Employment Insurance, Worker's Compensation) so that we can understand the systems and work for change.

Doing Freedom: Ethnography of an adult literacy centre
with Bonnie Soroke

Rapporteur: Anneke van Enk

Bonnie opened by explaining that her zipper sculptures actually began as two-dimensional photocopies of zippers arranged to represent a frustrating experience in an educational environment. Then one day, she brought actual zippers into a conversation while literacy tutoring to illustrate how she saw certain power issues in schools; the person she was speaking with took them up in response, and an entire exchange took shape using not only words but zippers. Bonnie eventually sewed wire into the zippers so that they could be "sculpted" instead of just lying flat and she began using them as a learning/teaching tool. She uses the zippers in her thesis work, too. She now uses the zipper sculptures not only as a tool for gathering data (for example, she used them to communicate with student interviewees at an adult learning centre, and invited them to use the zippers as well) but also for reporting on her findings. Bonnie believes the zipper sculptures are a strong reflective tool. They help with "what feels like a five-dimensional process."