Women literacy workers often talk about the tensions they feel in the fine lines between their roles as teacher, counsellor, facilitator. How can they work responsibly?

• And I think with my literacy students that the role that I take on with them in the class-which is confidence building, nurturing, encouraging, helping, all of those things-are things that they see women doing for them. And especially the male students are willing to take it from a woman... It's something that they expect from a woman.

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• [We need] some kind of assistance that can help the group to be able to move through some of [the issues] without wearing us out. Because so many times we all felt as though-either we're tutors here or we're counsellors. And more and more we felt as though we were counsellors. And more and more we felt inadequate in that job. We were OK with the tutoring... But the counselling was really very fearful. Now that may be nothing more than the society that we live in that professionalizes everything, including women's experience. But it may be more than that.

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• Very often the students see us as counsellors. We have to be able to draw the line. I cannot counsel a person who has been sexually abused. I cannot counsel a person who has been physically abused. I cannot counsel a person who has been in trouble with the law. I will talk to them. They can vent any emotion. They can just cry, they can talk for an hour. I'm here. What I will do is I have a list of service agencies. I'll say, look, these people will help you. I can't-in many ways I'm not allowed. If you look at it, I could get in very serious trouble if I counsel somebody that I thought was good advice and it turned out to be really horrible. I won't set myself up to do that. Not so much for my own protection but for the protection of the student. I mean I have to protect my job, of course, but I have to think "I don't really know about this." I have to always keep that in the back of my head. "I don't know about this."

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• I have lots of qualms about mixing the role of teacher and therapist ... [with] the power relation between students and teachers that's already there, being given more power or taking more power than I already have is something I would steer away from... It's a very difficult relationship for me to be in. I don't have very much experience with having a therapist myself and I do have a negative view from lots of stories from women.

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• When [teachers] ask a student to write and a student writes something that says my husband beat me up last night-the onus then immediately comes on that faculty. What does that teacher do---say, well, there are two grammatical and three spelling errors here? So I know the tremendous struggle that teachers are always going through.

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• If I were 27 instead of 47------I'd probably be much more inclined to drop in with both feet. Think I was really going to make a big difference. And now I think I can give her this much. I can give her this kind of competency. I give her this kind of attention, this kind of help. The rest of her life, I might make a reflection or something, or just maybe even help her sort it out in her mind. But I'm always going to go back to literacy.

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• I don't feel like my counselling role is to solve things in any way. But just to be a place where people feel they can talk about it and if they need to know something about where to go, that they know that they can ask. I feel like I can't solve everybody's problems and I feel really frustrated that ... just individual band-aids but that's all I can cope with...

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