HOLISTIC DEVELOPMENT OF ILLITERATE WOMEN OF BERHAMPUR CITY

What are the causes and consequences of women’s low literacy levels? How are women learners bringing unique strengths to the challenges they face? What do women learners have to teach us about the best ways to reach out to other women, to nurture leadership, and to create the kind of change in society that will address systemic injustices? How have teachers created lessons that resonate with women’s everyday experiences? With this issue on women and literacy, we address these questions (and more) by sharing the perspective and wisdom of adult learners and their teachers. In this issue, student voices are prominent as their writings highlight what they’re going through and how they define issues for themselves. The teacher writings outline some of the transcending curriculum issues related to women and literacy. “Being a woman is something to be proud of, but it includes many challenges,” writes Agnes Nansubuga. The challenges are not unfamiliar. As many of our student contributors report, family responsibilities, abuse, inadequate income, and gender and race oppression make getting an education challenging. Punitive immigration and welfare laws put an extra burden on women learners from other countries and women with low or no income. Perhaps less familiar are the enormous strengths that women bring to the process of learning and changing—not just themselves but the world we live in. The articles here reflect many of those qualities. Women learners with disabilities provide guidelines for ways to support women with disabilities in their learning. Intergenerational Asian American women support each other inside and outside of class. A nursing home worker uses her union membership and improved literacy skills to protect her rights (and those of others) on the job. Immigrant women learners start with their own real-life dilemmas and their own problem solving abilities, and engineer both private and public solutions as they gain literacy skills. Diverse women’s voices come together in this issue to claim women’s power to change, grow, support each other, and create a better world. You will also notice that The Change Agent now has a new format. We hope teachers will be better able to reproduce pieces for use in the classroom. This collaborative effort between WE LEARN and NELRC gave us an opportunity to promote both the former’s commitment to the creation of women-centered literacy materials and the latter’s focus on the adult learners’ role in social change. The experience and enthusiasm of our editorial board generated much of the vision and content for this issue. We thank them. We also received many more high quality student and teacher submissions than we had room for in the print issue. Thanks to the WE LEARN Web site (www.litwomen.org/tca/index.html), an addendum of these pieces is available online. WE LEARN, with the agreement and support of NELRC, will continue to use this issue to promote women’s literacy issues and to build curriculum and community networks. We encourage you to contact WE LEARN and to participate in this important work. After all, as community activist Klare Allen reminds us, education is not just about reading and writing, it’s about “learning what you need to know to be the kind of person you need to be and to have the kind of community you want to have.