The problem of distance

In this project, the research meetings took place in spacious places, full of light:  Sheila Stewart’s living room, Parkdale Project Read, a room at the Davenport Perth Neighbourhood Centre that overlooked a garden, the meeting room at AlphaPlus.  The meetings filled these spaces with laughter, insight, stories, listening, hearing, art.  We came to places of profound discomfort, and in these places, explore what it is in us that can do literacy work better.

This experience has helped me to think about the problem of distance in my work.  For me, distance has always been essential.  I have needed to keep myself from tipping into learners’ stories in order to support the telling of these stories and the learning that comes from this telling.  On the few occasions when I found myself identifying too closely with the stories, I became incapacitated, an emotional wreck, unable to cope.  In this project, I found that I was not alone in this. 

The project has also deepened my understanding of literacy learning as a process that takes place across social divisions which we cannot ignore or pretend to cross.  Literacy workers and literacy learners meet at a table.  At one level, the table brings us together.  At another level, it embodies separateness, enforced by the divisions of class, race, gender and culture that characterize our society.  If we fail to acknowledge the distance which this separateness creates, we deny each other, erase literacy learners’ stories and our own.

So literacy work involves distance.  But we can achieve the wrong kind of distance.  We can insolate ourselves from learners’ stories, disassociate ourselves completely from them, retreat into a world of professionalism that reduces their stories to texts, objects of study.  This project has made me particularly aware of how prone I am to creating this kind of distance from learners’ stories.  A learner tells me a story of struggle, suffering, hope.  I write this story down, make it into a Language Experience Story, use it to help the learner with his or her ability to recognize written words.  There is nothing wrong with the Language Experience process in itself.  This process creates a window on patterns in written language that has been useful to many of the literacy learners that I have worked with.  But there is a huge part missing if I have not attended  to the story itself,  allowed a nourishing spaciousness around it, letting it grow, become a place of learning.

In our final research meetings, we often talked about spaciousness.  Spaciousness requires distance of a particular kind, a non-judgemental, non-interventionist openness to what learners have to say.  For example, several of the researchers described how they had created spaciousness for learners’ stories by encouraging learners to write without asking to see their stories.  Others talked about listening to stories without rushing to transcribe them.  This kind of distance is nourishing because it allows stories to develop, go deeper.  In keeping a respectful distance, the literacy worker lets the story breathe, to use Sheila’s phrase, refrains from wrapping a story up, to use Mary’s phrase.  Differences between the learner’s story and the literacy worker’s story remain unresolved.  Sometimes, to use Sally’s phrase, a seed cracks open, and learning grows.

The spaciousness of those rooms had found its way into the exploration of how to achieve space for story in literacy work.

At the end of this project, I am more aware of the difficulty of hearing another person’s story.  At the deepest level, hearing any other person’s story is not possible.  The social divisions which separate literacy workers from literacy learners compound  this impossibility.  But, paradoxically, by acknowledging the difficulty of hearing and keeping the kind of distance that we called “spaciousness,” we create the possibility of respectful listening.  This, in turn, supports telling and learning across social divides, by literacy learners and by literacy workers.