Learning From Each Other

by Norma Lundberg

This issue of Women's Education des femmes appears at a time when the country is going through great stress economically, and women are bearing the brunt of the strain. Cutbacks in education, in training programs, literacy programs, in the workplace, and childcare all affect us profoundly. The articles gathered here are not explicitly about these cutbacks nor are they organized around anyone theme. They are about women's struggles to learn, and implicit in all of them is the connection between our learning and our livelihood, and our awareness that our lives can not be compartmentalized.

If there is a common thread among the articles in this issue, it is of women confronting difference — of race, class, physical ability — in their learning. What comes through the conflict is respect for difference, the acknowledgment that there are many paths to change, and that within the categories of "women", "visible minority", "disabled" (or any category of traditional exclusion) are individual voices with stories to tell.

Sandra Acker writes about women working in higher education — a system difficult for women academics to enter and attain status, a system in which women rarely, if ever, are permitted to join the inner circles. "Equity" for women, visible minorities, aboriginal people, disabled people (what Mary O'Brien has called "commatized" people) is just beginning to happen (1). Another writer meets and shares stories with disabled women in El Salvador, women who had despaired of being given an education and so organized to educate themselves. In the process, they discovered their strength. And an anti-racist educator explores the permeation of racism in our lives, and the particular challenge that racism presents to feminism. Struggles over racism are part of the work of Sistren Theatre Collective, described in another article in this issue.

At the last board meeting of CCLOW, we discussed the need to pay more attention to women's diversity, so that our "national voice for women's education and training in Canada" would represent the voices of Canadian women from all contexts. When we look at ourselves, we see a board that is predominantly white and middle-class. There is an element of shock in this recognition, for we have believed that we attempt to listen to all women's voices.

We are eager to be open to and to hear from other women about their lives and their learning. We can all learn from one another. We learn from Lona Smiley in this issue who writes of her endurance and anguish in a job re-entry program. We also learn about alternatives to our exclusionary and gender-biased educational system from a home-schooling parent and from a student of experiential learning portfolio development.

What I have learned, since becoming a board member last June with CCLOW, is the power of our collective voice through the respect for our individual selves. Our struggles for education need not be isolated struggles for individual differences to be heard; we gather strength from each other, from telling each other our stories. What continues to excite me about CCLOW is the commitment to individual growth and participation in communities, whether these be communities of higher education, childhood education, education for work, etc.

As Adrienne Rich wrote in Of Woman Born: "The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities" (2). Think of what we can do together.

Norma Lundberg sits on the Board of CCLOW and is a member of the Editorial Committee.