• Another woman instructor, talking about women-only groups, questioned whether women working together, without men, is natural.

I want to acknowledge that the vast majority of the literacy workers, instructors and administrators I spoke with during this research are creative, aware, experienced, reflective practitioners. In fact, they are exceptional in terms of the amount of time they spend interrogating their practice and their theory. I am not trying to show what happens when programs are run poorly, but rather to show the contradictions and tensions that arise in exemplary programs where both the instructors and administration articulate a model of critical literacy and critical pedagogy.

In fact, all the programs I visited in the first phase of the research would identify themselves as learner-centred and community-based. Yet, although commonly used, these are difficult terms to define. Partly this is because "learner-centred" has been co-opted by everyone from government bureaucrats to computer-software companies. But also, it has become the subject of some serious discussion within the literacy and adult basic education community.

In their study of community-based literacy programs, for example, Elaine Gaber-Katz and Gladys Watson (1991) describe learner-centred practice as encompassing "a commitment to active learning, a process whereby learners will be involved in setting their own learning goals and determining their own curriculum." (p. 8) They also identify some contradictions between learner- centredness and the two other characteristics they identify in community-based literacy, literacy from a critical perspective and community-building.

A point of some tension is whether a self-determined curriculum, which focuses on the individual learner's experience, can also be a "social change" curriculum that will support the empowerment of individuals and the community through collective social action. (p. 27)

My concern with learner-centredness in this research was not so much with curriculum and community change, although these are obviously important areas for discussion. Instead, I focused on the way in which the principles of learner-centred programming makes invisible certain kinds of relationships among students, among workers, and among students and workers. Placing individual students at the centre of the program may help resolve some of the authority issues inherent in one-to-one or small-group teacher-centred programming. However, it does not necessarily confront other contradictions - those that arise out of differences in race, sex, class background, abilities, source of income, immigration status, and so on. (See Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore,1992, for further exploration of these contradictions.)

What I would like to do here is use two excerpts from interviews conducted during phase one of this research to show how we can look at certain patterns of speech and to play with possible interpretations of what is not being said. Obviously, we don't express our thoughts as precisely or coherently when we speak as when we write. I still believe, however, that a close attention to what is left out of our speech can help us discover the contradictions within which we all work.