Monday and Wednesday mornings I meet with a women’s upgrading class in a small room on the second floor of a community centre. They are doing English and math pre-college courses. Half of the women are from a program for mothers who have been in shelters or homeless and now have four years of stable housing for themselves and their children. The other women are mothers from the neighbourhood. 

One morning I see a smiling woman in a floral dress breeze past our classroom. Perhaps someone here for an interview, or a meeting, or maybe she is a new staff person. A little later again she looks in, establishing eye contact with me as I look up from helping a student with her sentence structure.

After class I introduce myself to the cheerful woman. This is her first day of a three-month contract as a caseworker. She seems happy to connect with me as I am with her – she may support some of the work I do to prepare the women for college. She reminds me of my younger literacy worker self: smiling, keen to connect, eager to please. I wanted to give people the attention they need and deserve and believed that would help – it would make something easier or someone feel better. It would help me be a better teacher.  

I recall that younger self, working at community-based literacy program Parkdale Project Read doing the Welcome Group for new students. It was a group with continuous intake where students would get started while they waited for a tutor to become available for them. Different students came each week and I tried to help them individually while creating a sense of group connection and familiarity and comfort with the program.  Welcome, my smiley self said.  Everyone is welcome. There were complexities in facilitating such groups which we rarely found time to talk about as practitioners, which I’m still reflecting upon fifteen years later. Such reflection gives me the chance to better understand some of what was at play in the dynamics between the students and myself.

I wanted students to have a group to join right away, rather than get discouraged by a long wait for a tutor or group. But, my discomfort with a dynamic between certain students, worries about the vulnerability of one of the women, doubts about the parameters of my role left me feeling like the ground was sliding out from under me. Reflecting in the context of a group of practitioner-researchers has allowed me to sift through some of my own unspoken assumptions and anxieties, to get at deeper levels of why certain moments of practice disturbed me.

It is helpful to unpack some of the tensions in my own practice. How do the differences between students and me shape the teaching and learning that takes place? How can I listen and learn more fully given the contrast between my experience as a white, middle-class, able-bodied, well-educated woman with a male partner and that of the students who are of various cultural backgrounds, usual living in poverty, sometimes with a disability, often having chronic health problems and other problems resulting from poverty? While I try to respect and help everyone in the literacy program, what old stories and aspects of my background play in my head? Such shared reflections help us to open the space to improve practice.

My smiling self full of good intentions began working in adult literacy in the1980s. But good intentions are not enough. As well, literacy work has become more difficult, with less time for colleagues to connect with each other, increased levels of poverty and discrimination, and increased reporting on fewer dollars. This project gave us the chance to listen closely to each other and ourselves uncovering more of why we do literacy work. We tried to reckon with the power we have as teachers and coordinators. Naming differences can be difficult but it is useful, rather than glossing over differences between our students and ourselves, or among us as practitioners. We asked how difference and power are entwined with how we listen and don’t listen to learners, and what we share and don’t share with learners. This project is part of an on-going conversation among literacy practitioners, researchers and our allies unpacking some of the complexity and possibility of literacy work.