Women's Literacy Power:
Collaborative Approaches to Developing and Distributing Women's
Literacy Resources
Women
Expanding
-- Literacy
Education
Action
Resource
Network
A Feminist Critical Pedagogy
for Womens Literacy
How is WE LEARN
-- a resource network advocating the creation and distribution
of women-centered literacy materials -- a feminist critical
pedagogy?
- Locates the gender-oppression of
women learners in adult education while recognizing and addressing
intersecting oppression based on race, class, sexuality,
disability, age, body size, ethnicity, language, labor, religion
(see Appendix Complicated Literacies)
- Acknowledges that women learners
can determine the directions of their own learning
- Encourages participation and
develops the leadership of women learners in all aspects of WE
LEARN; encourages support, information and encouragement among
peers
- Reminds that access to the press
and publishing is based in power and supports the effectiveness of
social democracy in action&endash;most women don't have access to
that medium, especially if they are non-readers or have limited
reading/writing skills
- Explores and identifies ways in
which adult women learners can affect and change the priorities of
print-media both for themselves and their communities; including
the writing of and creating their own writings based on their own
experiences
- Recognizes that literacy workers
have much they can learn from each other and from women
learners&endash;together, they become collaborators in women's
education
- Calls for systemic changes in the
literacy materials used in literacy programs. For the most part,
teachers and learners have little input into what curriculum
materials get used. New guidelines and resources need to be
developed.
- Calls for action while
understanding the issues of power and authority as it creates and
demands more access to women-centered literacy
materials
- Insists on a more holistic
approach of education that includes not only rational aspects of
thinking and learning but also uses affective processes and
subjective experiences
- Acknowledges and encourages
multiple literacies&endash;including multi-languages, oral
traditions, non-verbal physical communications, visual symbols and
art, etc.&endash;not only print-based reading and writing
skills
- Develops multiple intelligences
and learning styles
- Removes practical barriers to
participation when possible (access, childcare, transportation,
etc.)
- Develops collaborative and
collective action across networks of learners, literacy workers,
programs
- Calls for the accountability of
all participants&endash;including literacy workers&endash;to
continually participate in our own learning and the willingness to
learn from each other
- Exists with the on-going emphasis
of action and reflection, evaluation and reevaluation, flexibility
and adaptation, theory and practice, voicing and listening
(communication), self-reflection and openness to learning from
others
- Views the creation and
distribution of women-centered literacy materials as an
opportunity to affect social changes and calls for the liberation
of women from all forms of oppression
- Addresses issues of empowerment,
critical thinking, power imbalances, leadership
development
- Uses conversation circles to
break the culture of silence about women learners reading
preferences, their literacy/reading needs, and their uses of
literacy.
Copyright © Mev
Miller, 2002
WE LEARN
Women Expanding Literacy
Education Action Resource Network
www.litwomen.org/welearn.html
welearn@litwomen.org