It was during this painful self-questioning process that the focus of the I research changed from what was happening to our students to what was happening to us. Much to our dismay it appeared to us as though we mostly left our feminism outside the door when we walked into the classroom. Calling ourselves feminist did not make us feminist instructors. Where had we gone wrong? Of course we didn't tolerate blatantly sexist comments or behaviour from any student. And we raised a woman's point of view when it was appropriate to the literature we were studying in class. But that hardly seemed as pro-active on women's issues as we view ourselves to be. Had we lost our energy to fight the good fight or had we never consciously taken our political and social analysis of women's issues into our literacy classes?

On the one hand we consider ourselves to be good literacy instructors. We work hard in the classroom with positive results. We spend a considerable amount of our spare time reading in the field and are repeatedly excited by those ideas and I strategies that indicate an emphasis on helping students find their voice and exercise their personal and collective power. On the other hand we consider ourselves to be feminists and have participated in countless meetings, rallies, conferences, workshops, and protests in an attempt to have women's issues heard and acted upon. Again we have spent considerable time reading about women's concerns and have been stimulated by stories and actions of sisters throughout the world. Why then does it seem that these two activities have remained separate for us? What has stopped us from bringing our feminist ideals into the classroom? Shouldn't a feminist perspective be added to any debate or discussion? Would a woman-positive approach in the classroom look different than a feminist one? Did these terms imply different things? We kept returning to these types of questions and only circling around the answers.

Feminist pedagogy and critical pedagogy:
Where does feminist literacy work fit?

One possible contributing factor is the nature of what we have been reading. Articles on women's studies classrooms and what goes on in them raise a myriad of interesting issues and concerns, both for the students and instructors, and contribute to the development of feminist scholarship.

Because most of the literature arises from work carried on at the university level, however, it doesn't speak to feminist literacy workers or address the issue of raising those kinds of concerns in a literacy classroom. University students are aware of the feminist focus of courses and express a desire or at least a willingness to pursue issues from that perspective when they opt to take such courses. Literacy students don't make those kinds of choices, in part because the opportunity to improve literacy skills by studying material from a feminist perspective is not open to them and in part because most literacy students don't name themselves as, feminists. However, despite this apparent separation between feminism and . literacy, it became impossible for us to read about feminist classroom practice in a university graduate women's studies course without making the connection between that and what we were doing daily in our own literacy classrooms.