Drawing the line

At the end of one workshop a teacher came up to me. She had just realized that the approach "they won't learn until they're ready" is another discourse that works against taking on issues of violence. She suggested that the work that might be necessary to help a student get to a point where they are ready to learn is made invisible in the institution, a task for the student alone to deal with. Now she was rethinking, realizing that there might be a crucial role for the institution and the teacher to support that process. The taken for granted discourse draws a line between the preparation work to be done by the student and tasks appropriate to be carried out within the institution.

Drawing the line is also often used to describe the "selfevident" divide between literacy work and therapy. As suggested earlier in this paper, this shared assumption helps to rule inadmissible any talk that might be identified as doing therapy in the classroom. Because there is clarity about what is outside the role of teacher, and in college settings there are counsellors on site, institutions can provide no support and no recognition for teachers who take on a role of supporting students struggling to learn. But, over and over again, we heard that counsellors in institutions often focus on "advising" instead of counselling, that counselling hours are insufficient for students to see counsellors. In community-based programs without counsellors on-site, teachers worry about the long waiting lists and lack of appropriate free counselling in the community. These pressures lead some teachers to feel that they have no option but to counsel. But if they do so, they take on the work illicitly, without resources, office space, supports, time and with the risk of being blamed for becoming "over-involved." Institutions benefit from this unpaid, unacknowledged work, while teachers can be framed as the problem.

What is missing?

We also heard often about the ways in which expectations about education were framed by particular situations. In various settings, instructors spoke about the challenge of taking up issues of violence given the specific lack of resources students and teachers experienced, the lack of institutional support for their work, and the outright hostility of some colleagues or the subtler resistances. Structural constraints such as attendance policies and waiting lists for places in programs increased the challenge. Literacy workers at Parkdale Project Read, a community-based literacy program in Ontario, mused about whether they would need to move from using volunteer tutors if they were to adequately address issues of violence: