4-2 The third workshop

Twenty-nine women arrived at a large downtown hotel in Ottawa on Thursday afternoon. In one of the rooms Frances and I posted many of the interview comments about the third workshop. Tannis displayed the design for the poster - "Discovering the strength of our voices" - and suggested different ways of coming at the discussion around the documentation. As they arrived women gathered in this room, talking together for an hour before dinner. We spent the rest of the evening re-introducing ourselves, reviewing what women had said during the interviews, and discussing the agenda.

We talked about moving beyond description and reflection, maintaining our focus on interpretation and analysis. The "what where, when, who, how" of the research had already been accomplished. We now needed to develop the "why," and agreed that each time someone made a descriptive statement - "Such and such happened" - the rest of us would be responsible for asking "why?"

Throughout the workshop, women worked alone, in pairs, in small groups, and the whole group to develop their analysis. Here, Vicki Noonan and Nicole Jessop develop a fan about self-esteem

It was also important that we stay away from general statements about women and about literacy. We wanted to stay grounded in the particular question of this research: What happens when some women in an adult literacy program decide to do something they consider woman- positive? Therefore, each time someone made a statement that wasn't grounded in our experience during this project we would ask "Did that happen for any of us in this project? Why? Why not?"

On Friday morning women separated into the three working groups they had chosen before coming to Ottawa. Frances facilitated the drawing group using a popular education process. Here, women used drawings, key words, and fans expanded from these key words to interpret women's experiences as outlined in the program descriptions and products. I facilitated the documentation group for women who had a particular interest in words and meanings. We would first talk about our response to the various forms of documentation then break into individual or small groups to further explore something of particular interest.