Welcome to Jenny Horseman's website

You may have learned about this web address from my book – "Too Scared to Learn" or from workshops, presentations or on-line discussions I have lead. Or perhaps you were simply searching the internet. However you found this site - welcome! I hope to hear from you!

When I began this website in 1999 Too Scared to Learn was just published in Canada by McGilligan, a small independent press, and about to be published in the U.S. by Lawrence Erlbaum, a large academic press, which I hoped would give it good international distribution. Too Scared to Learn grew out of my years as a literacy practitioner and my research on women and literacy, which led me to carry out an extensive research study where I interviewed counsellors and therapists, literacy learners and workers. I followed up the research with a series of workshops and online discussions to explore the issues further. I wanted to continue this exciting conversation on this website. As a community based educator and researcher I hoped the site would provide a “space” to continue to engage with others and develop our collective understanding on this issue. I wanted to:

Now in 2006 there is a growing community of researchers and practitioners exploring and addressing the impact of violence on learning. It seems timely now to support the widespread growth of understanding of this issue and build the community with a whole new site to bring together the myriad voices of those with knowledge in this crucial area.

The new site www.learningandviolence.net is just beginning. Over the next years it will become an interactive educational site to support learning, teaching and research that seeks to understand and address the impact of violence on learning more fully and creatively. Eventually I dream it will be a hub to find people working in this area anywhere in the world and to engage in many different ways with our collective knowledge in this area. I hope you will bookmark the site and go back often. The site will become dynamic, once users add their insights, their questions, and their ideas for how it should develop.

This site www.jennyhorsman.com will continue as my personal site - the place where I will post my new writing and where I would still love to read your feedback on my ideas. I invite you to tell me what you agree with or disagree with in my writing, to tell me what happened when you tried out ideas I suggested in my workshops or publications. Click on the 'Guestbook' button on the left to make your thoughts public or write to me privately at: website@jennyhorsman.com

I continue to weave research and projects that allow me to put my learning from research into practice with students and educators and to write trying to reach as broad an audience as possible. You can check out my publications in the ‘Articles’ and ‘Books” pages on this site. I have re-organized the pages in the hope that you will be able to find resources that are useful to you. Extracts from many of these materials will also be included on the new website along with many other resources.

Over the years (since 1989) I have worked closely with Parkdale Project Read – a community-based literacy program in the west end of Toronto. The program is an exciting place to learn, volunteer, or work as it grapples with the complexity of creating a safer learning environment recognizing that experiences of violence are widespread and may have affected anyone in the learning community. I have also worked with literacy educators across Canada and in the U.S., which has helped me see diverse ways to address the impact of violence on learning in different settings and led to more materials.

Feel free to copy and pass on articles and handouts you find here to build the discussion and change practice in this area. If you do so please tell me how you and your colleagues are using these materials. And don’t forget to check out www.learningandviolence.net - its development will depend on you.

NEW: Moving Research about Violence and Learning into Practice

An amazing array of practitioner researchers applied to participate in this project. After an agonizingly difficult process six were selected. This project now has twelve researchers committed to moving research about violence and learning into practice. The practitioner researchers, from three provinces, gathered in Alberta in April to map out the project in detail and design the twelve small research studies. Researchers are working on individual studies now and will workshop interim findings with literacy practitioners in November ‘06 in Saskatchewan and Alberta.

To learn more about the project you can read the full proposal.

You can also visit the Where in the World section on the Learning and Violence website. By clicking on the upper-right portion of Canada, you can access a mini-book on this Canada-wide project, and "meet" our 12 practitioners..

Watch this space for more information as the project evolves.