3-4 The second interview

The second interviews with the contact women also took place during our visits. These took anywhere from twenty to ninety minutes, covering nine general areas of interest as outlined on a common interview schedule. We asked women to describe what had happened with their woman-positive activity, what effect it had on them, on other staff, and on students. We talked about what they had learned personally, professionally, and politically. We asked them to talk about the resistance they encountered. We asked how they had experienced the work as "research."

As a move into analysis, we asked them to name the three issues they became most aware of during the project and what they envisioned as possible woman-positive developments in their programs in the future. In order to get ready for the third workshop, we discussed what they thought we meant by "collaborative analysis" and what they wanted to happen at the third workshop. Finally, we referred back to the first interview and asked how their understandings of "woman-positive" and "feminist" changed over the time of the project, as well as how they now understood the relationship between the two.

Many women used this interview and their review of the typed transcripts as a way to develop their interpretation and analysis of what had happened over the last year. The questions moved from the concrete to the reflective to the categorical providing a process for women to use their own experiences and make room for the experiences of other women involved in the research. Much of what women said during the second interview is not included here because it appears elsewhere in the documentation of this research - in the program descriptions, collaborative analysis, recommendations, and in Women in literacy speak - The power of woman-positive literacy work . Nevertheless, many of the responses to the questions on what women learned and where they experienced resistance provide a context for the work of the collaborative analysis at the third workshop.

• What have you learned personally, professionally, and politically because of your participation in this project?

Many of the women had trouble distinguishing between personal, professional, and political changes, experiencing these areas of their lives as completely intertwined. Changes in one area automatically meant changes in the other areas. For example, Nancy Steel (Keyano College) talked about how her greatest learning came because she was challenged to think of women not only as learners and students, but as women learners and women students. She first identified this as a professional issue, then realized it was also political. It forced her to rethink her assumptions about how to interact with students in a democratic classroom. While she still wanted to see students as individuals, she now adds to that her understanding of women as a specific group with specific learning needs and interests, viewpoints and positions that are valid enough to be explored, that are not considered too emotional or too difficult, or too unconcrete or too ambiguous to explore.