Collaborative analysis and recommendations

While the formal collaborative analysis happened during and after the third workshop, women individually and collectively engaged in analysis throughout the project. The process of reflective writing, talking about their activities with others in their programs, and hearing about others' activities at the workshops helped develop questions about why things happen the way they do. At the second workshop in particular, women had many structured, unstructured, intense, and wide-ranging discussions through which they created connections among their different experiences. This is when the analysis really began.

The second interview furthered women's analysis of their experience. In particular, one question asked women to focus on the three issues that seemed most important for them from the research. At the third workshop, women used a framework of questions that helped them develop analysis statements. They then worked with those statements to develop a series of recommendations. What follows is a summary of the major themes women identified, their response to the analysis questions, and their recommendations.

Central themes

• Violence

Violence became a central theme as women talked about the pervasiveness and magnitude of violence in the lives of women students and staff. They discussed the ways male violence affected students' learning in the public school system and the ways it now affects their learning in adult literacy and basic education programs - or stops women from participating at all. Women staff must respond to many dimensions of violence against women as students and staff deal with current or past abuse. Some male students may be known as current abusers, a situation which raises difficult issues for adult literacy instructors.

• Poverty

Women talked about poverty as a systemic form of violence. The lack of resources and services for women who are hungry, homeless, sick, or disabled results in terrible stress not only for them but also for the workers who become involved with them. This severe poverty may often be invisible since women denied a minimum standard of living either never appear in classrooms or silently drop out.

• Discrimination

A major issue for many women was the violence of systemic discrimination - racism, sexism, ablism, and homophobia - both within their programs and throughout society. They spoke of the need for training for practitioners and for anti-discrimination policies in programs.