Problematizing Women's Literacy:
the CCLOW experience

notes from a session at the women and Literacy Conference, Atlanta, Georgia
January 1999
Linda Shohet

[In this session, my colleague Isa Helfield talked about her experiences in a Montreal adult literacy classroom working with women and using CCLOW materials. She was one of the teachers who pilot-tested some of the women's literacy curriculum materials, and has worked with alternative methods for many years. She is also very sensitive to issues of abuse as they impact on learning. Without being actively involved in the organization, lsa epitomizes the people who have benefited from CCLOW publications and activities.]

The Canadian Congress for Learning Opportunities for Women (CCLOW) is a national organization committed to researching and promoting education and training for women since 1979. For the past decade, the organization has undertaken a series of research, curriculum development and facilitator training projects on women and literacy. Through a rapid overview of the organization and their literacy work, I want to suggest that these projects have helped shape international discussion of the issue and have uncovered problems that mirror some current debates in both the women's and literacy movements.

A context: 20 years of CCLOW

To situate this discussion, CCLOW was founded in 1979 by a group of Canadian feminists who perceived the need for an organization dedicated solely to the learning issues of women. Within ten years, they had achieved recognition in academic and government sectors for their research and advocacy on women's education and training. They had created networks in every province and developed two publications, one of them Women's Education des femmes, a bilingual journal with serious gender analysis and strong classroom connections. They had also organized the first national conference on women and technology (1982) and initiated innovative projects such as the first bridging program for women in Canada.

Celebrating their 10th anniversary in 1989, they made a number of commitments including creation of a scholarship for women returning to high school, and the beginning of two major research projects on women and literacy. The core of this presentation begins there. But a note of concern has to be inserted here. In the 10th anniversary issue of Women's Education des femmes, the editorial raised a mild alarm:

Unfortunately, the climate ...has changed since the first ten years. We have recently been informed by the Women's Program, Secretary of State, that our operations funding will be cut by 15% from last year's level. In the short term, we are going to be forced to take some painful choices. In the long term, it will depend on us. Can we lobby successfully by ourselves and with other women's groups, to have the Women's Program spending policy reversed? Can we successfully do the outside fundraising ...to ensure we can carry on with the projects we have planned? Can we pull together...to make the next ten years as fruitful and productive as the last ten?

(Joan McFarland and Susan Witter, "A Dream Ten Years old; A Challenge for the Future," WEdf 1989)

Ten years later, I can tell you that the cuts continued through the 1990s; the painful choices became more painful until many women's organizations have disappeared entirely, and CCLOW has been reduced to having a part-time executive director and a part-time administrative assistant to run a national office. On March 31, 1999, CCLOW will close that office, but remain a functioning organization operating electronically with a contract-paid coordinator.

The positive side is that despite the cuts, in the next ten years, CCLOW remained productive, most visibly through its literacy projects which are the focus here.

Women and literacy

In 1990, CCLOW received the first of several grants from the National Literacy Secretariat. This was for a 2-year study of twelve adult literacy programs across the country, focusing on women's everyday experience in these programs. The programs had a variety of mandates and organizational structures; sites ranged from urban to rural, from the east to west coasts and the far north. They were located in community colleges, a union, and a prison; six were community-based- on the street, in store-fronts, in public housing, in a Native friendship centre and in a community centre.

At least two women from each of these programs considered what happens when women decide to engage in learning activities designed specially for them; they called these activities "woman- positive." This phrase has now come into wide usage internationally without much awareness of its origins.

The project was groundbreaking in several ways. It did not start out to test any hypotheses, to increase students' levels of reading or writing or to improve grade standings. It did not set out to empower women or to encourage feminist analysis, or even to help programs become more woman-positive. But these things still happened.

As participatory action research, the project trained these women, then provided support and resources as they planned and implemented woman-positive activities in their programs. They developed a collaborative analysis and a series of recommendations. And they documented every step. Among their findings was the prevalence of violence in the lives of adult learners that researchers such as Kate Rockhill and Jenny Horseman had recently written about. CCLOW as an organization eventually took up the subject of violence as a barrier to learning, dedicating two issues of WEdf and a series of national workshops to exploring it in depth and suggesting broad changes to education policy and practice.