Possible Actions:

• More discussion of trustworthiness amongst instructors and program workers would lead to further exploration about the complexities of the issue.
  
  
• Curriculum to help learners to explore and build trust in their own knowledge and ability to learn...
  
  
• Trust building exercises in classes and groups...
  
  
• Training in sensitivity as regards trust and boundaries for paid and volunteer staff, and awareness building for learners.

Safety and Telling Stories

Much good literacy practice includes learners writing about their own lives. Often learners are asked to write journals, sometimes these are “response” or “dialogue” journals where the instructor or facilitator writes a reply or reaction after each journal entry. Beginning literacy students are asked to tell a “language experience” story, where an incident from their own lives becomes the basis for their own reading. If learners feel they must be careful about what they reveal during these activities, then again, energy is being expended to take care about what to reveal and what not to reveal.

I am not suggesting that the more open learners are, or the more fully they feel able to tell their stories in the literacy classroom, the better. Instead, I want to draw attention to the energy that learners have to put into deciding what they will say or write and into worrying about whether they will be shamed. This tension and fear is another distraction from the task of developing the ability to read and write with ease. One therapist suggested that learners may be continually asking themselves “If I tell this, can you ‘hear’, or will I have to take care of you?” and “If I tell this, can you hear, or will you shame me?” Clearly, that doubt takes us back to the question of trust. And when learners have built some trust that the class or group is a safe place to take risks in learning, they may be tempted to be more open with the stories of their lives. Disclosures make a demand on the instructor and on other learners to be able to “hear.” Safety, in the literacy program, is a complicated concept. Some learners will want the program to be a safe place to tell their stories, others will want it to be a place where they are safe from violence or hearing disturbing accounts of violence in the lives of others.