In the Haines Junction student association, differences related to ethnicity surfaced among students of the same gender. For instance, the Native and Mennonite women held different positions on motherhood and family and this, in turn, dictated who was able to participate in extracurricular activities. The majority of the Native women wanted to participate in fund-raising activities and were willing to attend conferences and go on field trips. However, the Mennonite women were not as interested in extracurricular activities. During the student interviews, I noted an undercurrent of tension with respect to the issue of participation in extracurricular activities. However, the staff and students, with the exception of Jean, did not articulate the relationship between participation and ethnicity.

Jean, a Native student stated that "they don't want to do anything else... Nothing. Just come here, do their work and go home... Cause to them, they find all these other little extra things here is not important." She later softened her criticism by stating that "it's not that they couldn't [participate], it's just that they couldn't because of situations." On the other hand, Heather, a Mennonite student informed me that "they talked about potlucks or bake sales and I didn't really agree with that." In both cases, these two students referred to they, without specifying who constituted they. However, it was clear to me that the Mennonite women constituted the group who did not want to participate in extracurricular activities and the Native women constituted the group who were willing and able to engage in extracurricular activities. Phelan (1991), an advocate for recognition of differences, would respond to this situation with the following suggestion: "The question we must ask is not simply whether people are 'the same' or 'different' within a particular structure, but how they are similar or different and what the effects of that are" (p.136). I think that sometimes it is also important to examine the historical and systemic structures in order to understand why people are the same or different. How would the social relations between the students have changed if the Mennonite and Native students had examined and discussed how their particular social location or their ethnicity underscored their reasons for nonparticipation?

The propensity not to acknowledge and work across differences among students is certainly understandable, given the discourse within which literacy coordinators in Alberta work. Adult literacy students rarely work in group settings within the volunteer literacy programs, and consequently differences among students are issues that are seldom, if ever, raised. When literacy workers do discuss student differences, it is couched in the terminology of learner-centered. Although this term connotes a willingness to address differences such as ethnicity, class and gender, the term has come to mean designing a curriculum to meet the needs and interests of the generic, nongendered, nonraced, nonclassed student.