There is reason to be skeptical about the effectiveness of volunteers as teachers, especially with students who have difficulties learning, who need more than practice reading and writing, and some experience of literacy as social interaction. Volunteers — with brief training, and working much less intensively than career literacy workers — simply have fewer opportunities to develop a depth and a repertoire of teaching skill. Sustained debate and developed research into the characteristics of effective one-to-one teaching; and into the situations where volunteers with brief training can be effective and those where they cannot, would be useful in pushing this discussion ahead.¹⁵¹

In a variety of ways, programs are learning to combine the benefits of one-to-one tutoring (an intense and supportive relationship, especially at the basic literacy level) and group work (broader support, and a sharing of problems). Small groups are particularly favoured in francophone programs throughout the country. Especially outside Québec, the small group setting is important as a space in which people can achieve confidence in their mother tongue and culture; for some francophones, it may be one of the few public spaces where it is possible to speak French. Programs that rely primarily on one-to-one teaching also organize small writing groups, or groups to study selected themes. Programs develop "bridging" efforts, usually involving some form of small group work, to help students move from one-to-one literacy tutoring to more advanced classroom instruction, where they encounter hierarchically organized curriculum, evaluation and teaching approaches, and, where, with increasing class size, they lose the close social support often provided in literacy programs. Documentation of arrangements which combine individual and group work could be very useful.

In discussions among people working with volunteers in different contexts, it sometimes becomes apparent that the relationship between volunteers and learners' communities is of crucial importance. Co-ordinators and trainers often wrestle with the hierarchical relationship between a tutor "who knows" and a learner "who doesn't know," or with a sense of social distance and superiority expressed when tutors talk about dealing with "these people." Co-ordinators of tutoring programs, in selecting tutors, sometimes seek teaching experience, but most often look for a supportive attitude and a willingness to learn; sometimes an effort is made to select tutors from backgrounds similar to those of people who will be students, or who are members of the same community as students. But when tutors are from the same community — a rural area, or a trade union, for example — the sense of hierarchy and distance does not arise because people know one another, and are likely to be interdependent, in broader contexts. These observations suggest that volunteerism may be at its best when it isn't "volunteer" work, but simply action within a community, to make it more self-sufficient.¹⁵² The discussion of all these issues concerning volunteers will continue for a long time, in part because they cannot be resolved at the program level alone, but also involve issues of policy.