Rethinking Violence and Learning:

Moving Research into Practice

Susan Heald - University of Manitoba, Canada
Jenny Horsman - Spiral Community Resource Group, Toronto, Canada

Abstract: Drawing on focus groups, interviews and participant observation, we explore the ways discourses of violence and of schooling impede efforts to develop literacy programs which respond to the violence and trauma women learners have experienced.

This paper draws on an action research study exploring the process of change in literacy programs and in program workers’ approaches when attempts are made to take better account of the relationship between literacy and many women’s traumatic experiences of violence. After a recent study (Horsman 1999) examined impacts of violence on adult literacy learning and recommended a radical reconception of adult literacy education to better support all women's learning, many literacy organizations in Canada and the U.S, are actively exploring how to create significant change in their programs. This current action research study provides opportunity for a detailed examination of myriad factors both facilitating and hindering the introduction of change in literacy programs.

Beginning from a commitment to social change, our current research is influenced by particular forms of poststructuralist theory that offer "...a way of conceptualising the relationship between language, social institutions and individual consciousness which focuses on how power is exercised and on the possibilities of change" (Weedon, 1987: 21). Through this frame, we are exploring how certain ways of conceptualising literacy, violence, and pedagogy guide particular actions and forms of organization within literacy programs, and thus contribute to or resist dominant power relations. The theory tells us that language, power and subjectivity are important. This paper offers an initial exploration of some discursive practices that appear to impede efforts to address the impacts of violence on learning in literacy programs.

Our research is drawn from focus groups and interviews with literacy practitioners in Duncan and Vancouver, British Columbia and Edmonton, Alberta. In addition, Jenny Horsman is conducting participant observation research while facilitating a women's literacy group in Toronto, Ontario. This group is an intensive course structured to allow women time to look at the violence they have experienced and its aftermath in their lives and focus on how to build their strengths as learners. Some participants in each of these sites are also co-researchers with us, engaged in collectively developing in-depth analyses of the dynamics of change when literacy workers and organizations attempt to alter practice to develop trauma-sensitive approaches.

In speaking of violence against women and girls, we are referring to a pervasive set of violent social practices, often sexualized, practices which have permanent or on-going physical, psychological and emotional effects on all aspects of a woman’s life.

Examining the discourses of violence and how they may hinder the possibilities of addressing violence, we became aware of the pervasiveness of silence and the difficulty literacy workers have in opening up talk about violence. In one focus group session, one worker spoke about a conversation with a woman about the violence from which this woman had escaped. Even though the worker suggested she had broached the topic out of a new commitment to speak about the issue of violence directly, she was surprised to realize later that she had not actually spoken of violence. Instead she had talked about "the situation." This indirectness struck a chord with many of us; a variety of pressures frequently seem to lead us to be less than direct.