The Violence and Learning: Taking Action (VALTA) Project invited literacy and adult educators to share and build knowledge about the impacts of violence on learning and ways to address them. Through workshops, an online course, Changing Practices research projects and other activities, we three co-facilitators and the Project participants explored ways to break silences about violence and to create environments to support learning for all. The intention of this book is to share what was learned from the Project and invite further exploration.

In chapters that follow, Project participants report on their research about applying what was learned in the VALTA course to their practices. This introductory chapter and the next one provide a backdrop for reading the reports. They also describe some of what we learned about ways to support learning and research. Chapter Three includes the Project evaluators' report.

Pathways to the Project

Although initiated in 2002, the VALTA Project was grounded in earlier research and practice and in the intertwining paths that we—Jenny, Judy and Mary—traveled to our shared belief in the importance of taking action about violence and learning. We decided to introduce the VALTA Project in this publication by revisiting these paths and the learning, hopes and dreams that shaped the Project activities and how we worked together.

Jenny's Path

In 1987, I was interviewing women in Nova Scotia for my thesis about women and literacy. When I was asking questions I thought were about the literacy practices in their daily lives, most of the women told me about past and present experiences of violence. I began to notice connections between violence and difficulties learning through their stories of shyness, school absence, and school failure. In that study I wrote about violence as the backdrop against which was set the women's desire for literacy to change their lives. Violence remained in the background in that writing, but my questions continued as I thought about the role of violence in contributing to difficulties women have learning in childhood and as adults (Horsman, 1990).