Exploring the concept of woman-positive
within learner-centred adult literacy programs:
A program-based action research project

Betty-Ann Lloyd
Coordinating Researcher
Halifax, Nova Scotia

In the spring and summer of 1990, I visited four Canadian communities to talk with women about their experiences in literacy programs. I went to Duncan on Vancouver Island, to Arviat on the Hudson Bay in the Northwest Territories, to downtown Toronto, and to St. John's, Newfoundland. As a contract researcher with the Canadian Congress for Learning Opportunities for Women (CCLOW), I spent sixty days exploring how women's gendered experience affects their access to and participation in adult literacy programs. Following this exploration, I developed research questions, a methodology, and a design for a long-term national action research project that would be carried out in partnership with a variety of programs. Both a final report about the first phase and a funding proposal for the second phase served as documentation of this exploratory work.

CCLOW published that report - Discovering the strength of our voices - and received over $350,000 funding from the National Literacy Secretariat for the two-year second phase project. Twelve programs across Canada agreed to participate in this second phase and we held our first national workshop for twenty-four women from these programs in Winnipeg in November, 1991 - two years ago. It was all very exciting. It was also somewhat daunting. Our research question seemed straightforward:

What happens when some women in an adult literacy program decide to do something they consider woman-positive?

What made the question more complex is that we asked women to make a commitment to being "up-front" about the woman-positive nature of this work, discussing it with administration, staff, and students during the entire process. As women said during the first phase, this level of clarity about being woman-positive involves a certain amount of risk:

We feel increasingly vulnerable because we are concentrating on ourselves as women and others [are] talking about us as women, and that becomes quite - I don't know what the word would be, we don't have a word - "Nerviness" -like a heightened awareness that has a bit of fear in it and that talks about the violence that's out there. As soon as you're singled out as "woman," there's a spectre of violence out there. (Lloyd, 1991a, 42) -