"But Is It Education?": The Challenge of Creating Effective Learning for Survivors of Trauma

Women often start literacy programs with a desperate hope to finally improve their education and begin to make essential changes in their lives. Some, who live with daily domestic violence, may believe that literacy or a better education will be a first step toward finding a paid job and escape. Others may hope to heal through pursuing their education.1 However, unacknowledged impacts of trauma on their learning may mean learners get only a chance to fail, to falsely confirm to themselves that they really cannot learn. This pattern leads learners and educators alike to become frustrated with the lack of possibilities for educational success or other fundamental change. In this essay I introduce research that I carried out from 1996 to 1999, looking at the impact of violence on women's literacy learning and program participation in order to develop approaches to literacy work that will assist women to learn (Horsman, 1997, 1998, 1999/2000).2 The research included individual interviews and focus groups with literacy workers, literacy learners, therapists, counselors, and staff of various organizations in five Canadian regions: British Columbia, the Prairies, Central Canada, Atlantic Canada, and the North. Key questions for participants were, What impacts of violence do you see in your literacy program/your work? and How can/should literacy programs address these impacts of violence? During workshops, presentations, and an online seminar, literacy workers and others (from the United States, Australia, Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as Canada) commented on my early writing and thinking, adding voices and honing the analysis I was beginning to develop (Alphaplus Literacy and Violence Online Seminar, 1998). Because I hoped my research would lead to changes in practice, I followed the first study with another, which was focused on what supports and what hinders making change in literacy programs to more fully support learning for all women and, in particular, those who have experienced violence.3 In a collaborative process with literacy organizations in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and New England, we sought to explore the discourses that support and limit possibilities for change (Heald & Horsman, 2000; Horsman, 2001; Morrish, Horsman, & Hofer, 2002). In the face of objections that were voiced as we spoke about addressing issues of violence as part of education, we wanted to understand more about the discourses that create different understandings of literacy work. Influenced by particular forms of post-structural theory (Weedon, 1987), I was interested in examining discourses as a tool to get outside a focus on what is right. I wanted to examine, instead, how certain discourses-both language and practices-open and close possibilities for reconceptualizing adult literacy work to support learning for all. Dominant discourses shape what we understand to be proper literacy work and education and impede program changes that might support learning for those who have experienced violence. Discourses about violence and education seem key in shaping what we-literacy learners, teachers, administrators, researchers, policy makers, and funders-take for granted about education, students, and teachers. These discourses shape policy, expectations, and whether resources are deemed essential or unnecessary. For example, if we know that education is not therapy and that dealing with the self and emotions is a matter for therapy sessions, not the classroom, then we see no need to learn anything about counseling. Counseling, in this frame, is not part of the work of a teacher. When dominant discourses have the force of government behind them, when they inform work practices, reporting processes, and the structure of funding, they are hard to resist. In literacy, the dominant discourses limit recognition of the extent of violence and the effects of violence on learning. The impact of violence is traditionally seen as separate from education and viewed as a matter for therapeutic interventions. …

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