We paid two women from each program to attend three national workshops that focused on research and reflection, discussion and documentation, and interpretation and analysis. We paid them for 1/2 day of research discussion and documentation each week. Frances Ennis from St. John's, NF, worked closely with three programs. I worked with the other nine. We kept in touch through journal writing, telephone calls, and two site visits. During each visit, we taped interviews with each of the two women most closely involved in the work.

The twelve programs in this research represented a wide spectrum of adult literacy practice. There were four community college programs - one on Vancouver Island, one in central British Columbia, one in northern Alberta, and one in the Northwest Territories. There were two store-front community-based programs - one in New Brunswick and one in southern Ontario. Other programs were located in a Newfoundland public housing community, a Manitoba Native Friendship Centre, the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour, a Saskatchewan prison for women, the inner-city streets of Toronto, and a Caribbean-Canadian women's group in a Toronto community-based program.

Clearly, women from these programs were going to have very different understandings of what it means to be woman-positive. As well they should! While I have never believed that there is one "correct" concept of what it means to be woman-positive, I do believe there is an "incorrect" way to approach the concept - one that puts itself forward as universal, as crossing boundaries of race, class, abilities, formal education, immigration status, employment status, sexual orientation, relationship to children, histories of emotional, physical, sexual, spiritual abuse.

I also went into this research with the understanding that, although CCLOW is a feminist organization, I did not expect the programs or the women who represent the programs to identify as feminist. I did have a bottom-line expectation that the program women directly involved in the research would believe that women in literacy programs may benefit from taking part in activities designed specifically for women. They will benefit not because women are somehow deficient, but because the programs and the government policies that structure the programs are somehow deficient.

The contact women would also presumably agree with the conclusion of the first phase - that learner-centred or community-based programs are not necessarily woman-positive - and they would also have agreed to explore how we might change, or at least make apparent, that seeming contradiction.

Learner-centred/woman-positive

I came to make this distinction between learner-centred and woman-positive from my first phase discussion with fifty-seven women and four men. During these discussions, I had a persistent feeling that I was missing something in my understanding. It was as if I was hearing something backwards, as if I was looking at a photographic negative where the white is black and the black is white. It was the feeling that all I could sense was the background even though I was aware that what I wanted was somewhere in the foreground.