National

Dear literacy worker by Sheila Stewart

My father used to say, “Are you still in the Cinderella of the education system? What about a pension? Aren’t there jobs in the school system for you?” Yes, Dad, I blew it in terms of establishing a properly paid career, but I’ve learned so much and worked with amazing people. My father grew up in a village in Ireland and escaped working in the linen mill by getting an education. I grew up listening to his sermons—he became a United Church minister. I ended up working with people who live in poverty, following what I’d heard him preach.

For many years I worked in a community-based program in Toronto. I remember my walk from north Parkdale where I live, to the program in the basement of the library in south Parkdale. I walked from an area where most people own their homes to one which is about 80% rental, from a mainly white neighbourhood to one where most people are people of colour. As I walked south, the streets changed and so did the opportunities, income level, and access to work.

To and from work can be a space to relax and unwind, but it’s also time to plan a lesson, think through a task, make a decision, and consider the best use of our limited time and resources. I’m trying to imagine you at the end of your day. It might be 5:30 and you might need to collect your children before you get dinner on the table. It might be 8:30, the evening group is over and you are waiting for the pairs to wrap up. Or perhaps tonight there was a board meeting and your head is buzzing with what got said and what didn’t, staffing issues, space issues, funding and reporting issues, the next fundraiser, who was at the meeting, who didn’t make it, what to do before the Annual General Meeting in two months, who else you could get to run for the board. Perhaps if you get home quickly, you’ll be able to help your son with his homework or see you daughter before she goes to sleep. The balance of work and home is never easy.

I think of what I know of learners’ complex lives and difficult choices. I think of a woman asking me to speak to her abusive husband on the phone, to tell him she was learning something. How carefully I modulated my voice, all I couldn’t say. I recall being bone tired at the end of a fundraiser, waiting outside mid-winter with a learner whose ride hadn’t shown up to transport her home in her wheelchair. I recall how I worried about two people in a group who didn’t get along, thinking one or the other would drop out, wondering if should I speak to them and how. I recall how moved I was at a year-end celebration as I called out the names of the learners who were receiving certificates. And I remember noticing a new kind of silence when one of the learners read a piece of their writing for the first time, then hearing the words of support and encouragement from the other learners.

I currently coordinate the Festival of Literacies at the Ontario Institute for the Studies of Education of the University of Toronto. I work with literacy practitioners and researchers to try to create a dialogue between the worlds of practice, theory, research, and policy. I know that many literacy workers don’t know about existing research or whether it is relevant to their daily challenges. But I don’t want there to be a hierarchy of literacy workers: those who do front-line work and those who have the time and space to think about it. I want the university where I work to help to make spaces for critical reflection on literacy work. I want literacy workers to have time and space to think about our work, and to be taken seriously when we talk about what we do and what we know.

I think many literacy workers are natural researchers. We are observant, intuitive, careful, and thorough. Our attentiveness to learners’ words and our practice using techniques such as language experience approach give us a ways of enacting respect—particularly as it relates to people’s words. We have a nuanced understanding of oral and written language and experience working with marginalized people for whom written and sometimes oral language are barriers. Our ability to explain things in clear, straightforward language is what most research is crying out for. We know a lot about working across differences of race, class, culture, gender, and other differences. I don’t think that we are better at this than any other group of people, but many literacy workers have a clear analysis, and lived experience, of how power differences shape all our relationships. We work to put learners at ease and create democratic spaces. Our work develops our creativity and resourcefulness.

Literacy work is about hope, it’s about what we imagine is possible for learners. When we meet a new learner at intake, hear about the challenges in their lives and see their tentativeness, we know they may not be back. Still, we hold hope for them and speak with them in a way that makes this hope audible. We need to hold hope for ourselves too, for our programs, and for the literacy field as a whole. There is a cycle of burn-out that often happens in literacy work. I think research can help with this. It can give practitioners the reflection time they need and deserve.

I’m reminded of an Irish folk tale that strikes a chord with our situation. In “The Children of Lir” the stepmother, Aoife, wanted rid of her four stepchildren and turned them into swans. She laughed and said their exile would only be over when a druid with a shaved head comes over the sea and they hear a bell ringing for prayers.

“Will you do nothing to lighten our sorrow?” pleaded Fionnuala. “Surely not even you are so cruel?”

“You shall keep the power of speech and thought,” answered the cruel queen, “and you will be able to sing more beautifully than the world has ever heard. That is all I shall give you.”

(from Malachy Doyle and Niamh Sharkey’s Tales of Old Ireland)

These swans, like us, are left with the power of speech and thought. As the world continues to be ruled by people who do not care about the lives of the people we meet in literacy work, we keep the power of speech and thought. We don’t have a lot of influence and we’ve already begged what we can from any friends with two cents to rub together at our fundraisers. Speech and thought are our birth-right. Speech is a major way we pass on our knowledge of literacy work to each other. By holding onto hope for learners, we hold on to their ability to build strength through speech and thought. Research has often exploited and misused people, but it has also been used as a way to look with fresh eyes at a situation and speak powerfully about what is happening. Research in practice can be a way to hold and practice hope for ourselves and our work.

My relationship to what I deem to be “knowledge” and to whether and when I see myself as a “knower” is shaped by my experience. It is also shaped by how I understand the interplay of practice, research, power, speech, thought and voice. Many literacy practitioners are aware of the transformative power of speech in individuals’ lives, sometimes described as “coming to voice” or “finding voice”. We have volumes to say about literacy learning and literacy work. We know this work in a much different way than policy makers and academics.

At the Festival of Literacies, literacy practitioners come together to talk and develop their ideas. Some literacy workers feel that their job is to help others come to voice. I do not want to conceive of literacy work as “giving voice” to others. Likewise, it is not policymakers and academics who give us voice. Together we work to create spaces which support literacy workers to speak, think, and write. Our work can make space for us to use our voices too.

I couldn’t easily explain my work to my father. Neither could I comfortably share what happened in south Parkdale with my neighbours ten blocks north. What seems crucial to me now is that we discuss this work with ourselves. Instead of needing to always justify our work to others, we must uncover and discover for ourselves, building our own vocabulary of what it is about.

I’m curious about you, how you juggle your work with everything else in your life, what space you find for your desires for the world and yourself. Literacy is about imagination. You may, like me, love the world of books and how they let us enter other people’s worlds. Likewise, we imagine the world of our learners and we dream of it getting easier for them, of spaces in their home life or work opening for them. Literacy is about entering and creating new worlds with learners and ourselves.

I’m wary of the do-good, missionary impulse which is part of what brought me to literacy. In uncovering my own story I hope to be more conscious of the underlying forces in my work as an adult educator and novice literacy researcher. I also came to literacy work because of a love of learning and language. My own learning is wrapped up with that of the literacy community. We teach and facilitate best when we are on the cusp of learning ourselves. We enter a dialogue with each other about our hope for our work. Some of this is in person and some on paper. Literacy is the play of words on paper and in our minds and hearts. Literacy colleagues’ words can offer us sustenance. The words of our fellow literacy practitioner-researchers can be harbingers of hope.

November 2005