Listen to women in literacy - The power of woman-positive literacy work; is designed as a resource for adult literacy and basic education programs. It contains a summary of the woman-positive activity in each program and outlines what the women involved learned. The format includes questions to help people think about how their programs can pay attention to the lives of women participants.

In this book

This book begins with a detailed account of the exploratory research and an outline of the research design and methodological framework for this phase, including validity practices and ethical considerations.

Coordinating researcher Betty-Ann Lloyd then takes the reader through the year-long process of description/action/reflection/discussion/documentation/interpretation/analysis. She presents the form and content of each workshop, visit, and interview. With seventy photographs and women's various descriptions of their experiences, readers have the opportunity to enter into this research from the perspective of practitioners who every day deal with the frontline work of providing adult literacy, basic education, and academic upgrading to Canadians. Through this research you can gain an understanding of the ways some women staff and students accomplished woman-positive work in their programs.

The next section includes the process through which women at the third workshop developed a collaborative analysis and recommendations. After participating in three very different interpretive activities, they used a series of questions to frame their understanding of why things happened as they did. The concluding recommendations address six arenas for action: program planning, implementation, and evaluation; provision of support services; professional education and development; coalition building; policy analysis and development; and the future direction of CCLOW.

The final section of this book begins with the personal histories, professional experiences, working conditions, and educational and political philosophies of the women who participated most directly in this research. It describes selected characteristics of students from the programs involved and provides some reflection on differences between staff and students.

This section continues with descriptions of the twelve programs, their communities, woman-positive activities, and the materials produced through the research. Each of these descriptions contain excerpts from women's interviews, journals, and published material. Photographs and captions from the project poster are reproduced, as are the front pages and covers of the programs' research documentation. The book ends with a bibliography of materials in the fields of women and education, research design and methodology, and feminist theory.