Profile of Participants

Each facilitator gave an average of four workshops. The number of participants varied from three to fifty, with an average of twelve. Settings included literacy and EAL programs, educator professional development days and/or conferences, a women’s conference, an adult education development class, secondary schools, university colleges, adult education centres, a Native cultural centre, the Toronto Native Women’s Resource Centre, a women’s bookstore, a support/housing service organization for urban poor and personal residences. The participants were adult educators, literacy tutors, university students, university instructors, literacy coordinators, EAL instructors, transition house workers, counsellors, teachers, librarians, therapists, social workers, learners. Their ages ranged from late teens to over seventy with most in about the thirty to fifty range. Eighty-five participants out of 510 were men (16%).

What Chapters or Issues from Making Connections did You Focus On?

Below is a list of either chapter headings or loosely defined subject areas, and the number of facilitators (in descending order) who mentioned using them in their workshops.

This list is not a completely accurate reflection. For example, a discussion of how to adapt lessons in Making Connections seems to have taken place in several workshops. However, only one facilitator mentioned this area as a part of Making Connections that was focused on. Also, specific exercises and chapters have been kept separate. This means that, for example, the two facilitators who mentioned using “My Wife Doesn’t Work” are not included in the number of those who mentioned using Chapter 1 (“Daily Lives”) in which this exercise is included.

What Was Stimulating for Participants?

The most common issue that participants found stimulating was “feminism”: what is it, how it is publicly perceived, what makes this curriculum feminist, how feminism relates to the principles of adult education, how the lives and experiences of women can be included in literacy work, how participants might identify themselves as feminist and using the workshop to check this out with others in the literacy field. Some found it surprising to consider that feminism does not exclude men; others began to make connections between their own lives and issues raised in the manual.

Issues of abuse and disclosure, as well as the ways in which women learners are silenced, were also frequently raised with participants interested in how Making Connections could help address them. The interests of some participants were more practical; they wanted to know how to fit this curriculum to government funding criteria or were just eager to get their hands on good material, ideas and resources to use in the classroom.

Most discussions centred around women’s lives and their relationship to literacy. In the words of one facilitator, the workshop “presented an opportunity to discuss women’s issues and learning in depth—something [the participants] had not had an opportunity to do.” The simple opportunity to meet with others (mostly women) working in the literacy field was stimulating, as was the Making Connections manual and the ideas for curriculum it presents.

What Challenged Assumptions Among Participants?

Most frequently, assumptions about feminism were challenged (“I’m pleased I came today. I hadn’t originally signed up due to the label ‘feminist’”). Participants assumed that feminism was “scary,” that it did not include men, that the term was negative, that feminist politics were not relevant to learning. Some participants had not thought about or thought through how women learners might be silenced or feel unsafe in their programs (“The silencing exercise helped me relate better to how adult learners might feel in the learning environment by pointing out situations in which I felt really uncomfortable and vulnerable”).

Assumptions about power, race, class and violence were also challenged. Some participants were challenged with respect to their positions as white instructors of diverse students. Some workshops helped to make visible the connection between power imbalances and silencing.

Some participants in the north had assumed that because Making Connections was from the south, it would not be relevant.

On workshop evaluation forms, some participants admitted that their assumptions had been challenged in a way that would positively affect their teaching: “The concept of self-esteem as necessary for learning to take place became much clearer to me”; “[M.C. raised] issues I hadn’t thought of before which would be relevant and important to my learners”; “[The workshop helped me to understand that] a male perspective could present limitations.”