Executive Director of CCLOW. In the first of many meetings, they discussed different possibilities for a study on women and literacy. By March, they had developed goals for a two-phase project:

• to examine how gender and the power balance of the male/female relationship affect women's access to, and experience of, literacy programs and how it affects the impact of literacy programs on women,

• to determine how literacy programs and literacy practice might be changed to better respond to the reality of the lives of adult women learners, and

• to share this information with women literacy students and workers, through print materials and in workshops, to foster the development of relevant, appropriate, and accessible literacy learning opportunities for women.

They wanted to find out how gender affects women's experiences in literacy programs and how those experiences could be improved, and they wanted to share what they found out with others. These eight women formed an advisory committee for the research.

The objectives of this first exploratory phase were:

• to talk with women students and workers involved in literacy programs,
• to develop key questions out of the "data" of the women's stories, and
• to develop a research design to investigate these questions further using an action research model.

After being hired to conduct this exploratory research, I spent the spring and summer visiting with advisory committee members and literacy program staff, volunteers, and students in four communities: Duncan, BC; St. John's, NF; Toronto, ON; and Arviat, NWT. I constructed a series of questions after each of these visits. Reviewing these questions and the formal and informal discussions I had during this time, I identified several important themes. These themes generated issues for further research.

In September 1990, CCLOW accepted the report, Discovering the strength. of our voices: Women and literacy program (Lloyd, 1991a). It was published early the next year. A central discovery of phase one was that, despite the many practical barriers to women's participation, women do want to take part in literacy and upgrading programs as students and as staff. Women know what these barriers are - no further research would be needed to identify them. Instead, it was time to do something about the barriers, to build on women's strengths, and to work with what we already know about the ways women learn. It seemed that if literacy programs want to honour women's stories, then they must begin to change the way they do their literacy work. What they needed was an opportunity to find out what happens when they attempt some of those changes.