2 What does it mean for us to think and talk about ourselves as “women”?

The women from each of the four communities I visited contributed something unique to this research.

Part of the uniqueness came from their location in time.

• When did I go to that particular community-in the first month of the research, or in the last?
• What questions did I want to explore at that particular time?
• Who did I speak to before I visited them?
• Who did I know came next?

Part of the uniqueness came from their location in space.

• How is the west coast different from the east?
• What can we say about southern Ontario cities?
• What can we say about northern territorial settlements?

Part of the uniqueness came from the lives of the particular women.

• How do women who are literacy students speak about their experience?
• Where do women who are paid literacy workers find their voice?
• In what sense do Native women in BC share a language with Inuit women?
• Do women with children tell the same stories? Women who are older?

These four shapshots of a particular experience in each community in no way tell the whole story of that visit. They do, however, focus the way in which my experience, as the researcher, was shaped by each visit. Part of this shaping comes from the experiential learning cycle:

I moved from beginning with basic questions and participating as an observer, to reflecting on my observations, conversations and readings, to trying to understand and analyze the experience through themes and issues, to strategizing around the next activity.

I focussed that experiential process after the visits with a set of questions:

• What do we do when we begin to talk among ourselves as women?
• When we begin to listen to women's stories, what do we hear about ourselves?
• Why do we need to pay attention to women's stories once we begin to hear them?
• When we hear women's stories about their lives, how do we begin to "do" literacy?

In the next section, the left-hand page contains excerpts from interviews from the community visit described on the right.