JOURNAL ENTRY - PAULA ----------- APRIL 15, 1992

The same student added that in India you are also asked for your marital status when you apply for work. When we talked about how this kind of information can be used to discriminate against women, the response was polite, but I sensed that the sympathy seemed to lie with the employer who is not able (in Canada) to get the information that he (she?) needs to hire a faithful and reliable employee. I believe that the students in this class are, by culture, too polite to have a good discussion/ debate on this issue - I think the power imbalance in our relationship (teacher / student), no matter how equal we try to be, also inhibits a rousing debate that may have gone on over these issues had they been raised in a class of literacy students where English was not the second language.

While we were not bothered by pointing out the differences that exist between Canadian laws and those from the students' countries, we felt that the power imbalance that exists between student and teacher inhibited the debate. Because we recognize this power imbalance we did not want to seem to be using our power to impose on students "the correct feminist perspective" - namely our own.

There were other examples of this happening in the classroom. We had an interesting exchange with a student in our class. She came to class one day proudly beaming and sharing the news that she was pregnant. A couple of weeks later her demeanor was not so joyous as she sadly explained that the heart beat of the fetus indicated it was a girl. She was distressed by this because in her culture baby girls are not valued and mothers of baby girls lose status.

Hearing this upset us and some of the other women in the class. We responded by echoing the traditional North American platitude: It doesn't matter if it's a boy or girl as long as the baby is healthy. She acknowledged our point politely and noncommittally but explained that the real problem was with baby number two. She and her husband only want two children and she would have to abort the next pregnancy if the fetus was determined to be a girl. We expressed our sadness that she felt that way. Our attempts to continue discussing the issue were not successful. Several of her classmates, however, were able to more openly . express what they really thought about her point of view. There was no power imbalance that inhibited a frank discussion among them.

However, we did not want to position ourselves as the knower of what were the correct ways of thinking about women's lives. By doing that we would have been acting in a very non-feminist way. As instructors and feminists, we think it is important to recognize, appreciate, and validate the knowledge and experiences that literacy students bring with them. But we also feel that it is essential to challenge the gender biased norms of our society. Our problem was how to do this in a way that did not negate the student's experiences and silence them in our class.