All the participants must be willing to see the activity as potentially changing the program as a whole, not simply as a way to have a positive impact on individual students or workers. The women's voices that emerge from the experience must be seen as tools to re-structure the program so that it is more inclusive of this experience.

Liz Stanley, a British researcher and writer, talks about feminist research as beginning in the everyday world of women. She believes that women know certain things and understand particular experiences because we live them. We have a particular epistemology - a particular way of knowing things - because we have a particular ontology - a particular way of being in this world. Through living our lives as women, we have a particular perspective on how social relations are set up within our society, including within our adult literacy programs.

We don't all know the same things because our everyday lives are very different. For example, those of us who live in rural communities live very different lives than those of us in urban centres. Those of us who face oppression because of racism live very different lives than those of us who have privilege because of the colour of our skin. Those of us with high degrees of formal education live very different lives than those of us who have very limited formal education. Nevertheless, Stanley writes, there are some things we share simply because we are women.

Some of the things that we know and understand because of our perspective have to do with power. For many ,women, doing research as women, with women, means making a political commitment to uncovering the ways power gets played out in our society. It means making visible many different kinds of power relations - power relations based on sex as well as on race, class, formal education, source of income, different abilities, sexual orientation, citizenship status, geographic locations. Feminist researchers have a political commitment to making visible how these different power relations affect everyone's lives, how they result in some people living at the centre of our society and other people dwelling on the margins.

Kate McKenna and Sandy Kirby, women who currently work out of Toronto and Winnipeg respectively, have written a book about how to do research from the margins. Using their perspective, we can understand women as on the margins of a sexist society, and literacy as on the margins of an education system that does not give priority to adult academic upgrading. They set out four processes of researching from the margins. I have adapted them to develop my own image of what it is to do research.