Women's Literacy Power: Collaborative Approaches to Developing and Distributing Women's Literacy Resources

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 learner’s reading preferences, their literacy/reading needs, and their uses of literacy.