During this research, one college administrator said she has to be careful what she says about what the literacy work in her college means to students because it "goes way beyond our [educational] mandate." She also explained that if teachers cross the boundary with counselling there are "liability issues" and if the college broadly crossed the boundary into therapy, there would be problems with the provincial government saying "this work is funded elsewhere and is separate from the work of an educational institution." She was revealing eloquently both how dominant discourses shape practices in education and how they are resisted.

Although discourses shape what we know, we also shape discourses. Discourses are not fixed for all time. They do not operate independent of people. We participate in them, resist them, and struggle to create alternate discourses to the dominant, taken for granted ones. For example, there is now a growing discourse about connections between violence and learning. As literacy workers increasingly discuss these issues, we begin to create possibilities for new understandings of literacy work, to challenge medicalizing discourses about violence, and explore new literacy practices which recognize impacts of violence on learning. When I led discussion online in 1998 more than one hundred people enrolled in the discussion and many talked about their delight in finding others prepared to engage in the issue. One participant said:

I just got on line and want to leap into the discussion... My desire to jump in is that I have been grappling with how to deal with issues of domestic violence in adult education programs for several years and have so often felt so isolated and without the opportunity to discuss with others how we understand and proactively address the issue. (Hofer in Horsman, 1999/2000)