Too Scared To Learn

Women, Violence, and Education

Jenny Horsman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135655709
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

Too Scared to Learn explores the impact of women's experiences of violence on their learning, and proposes radical changes to educational programs through connecting therapeutic and educational discourses. Little attention has previously been paid to the impact of violence on learning.

A large percentage of women who come to adult literacy programs have experienced, or are currently experiencing, violence in their lives. This experience of violence negatively affects their ability to improve their literacy skills. Literacy programs and other educational programs have not integrated this reality into their work.

This book builds on extensive research that revealed the wide range of impacts violence has on adult literacy learning. Interviews with counselors and therapists, literacy learners, and educators working in different situations, and a wide range of theoretical and experiential literature, form the basis of the analysis. Educators are offered information to support reconceptualizing programs and practices and making concrete changes that will enable women to learn more effectively. The book makes clear that without an acknowledgment of the impact of violence on learning, women, rather than getting a chance to succeed and improve their literacy skills, get only a chance to fail, confirming to themselves that they really cannot learn.

Essential reading for literacy and adult education practitioners, teachers of English as a second language, and education theorists, Too Scared to Learn explores the intersection among trauma, psychological theory, and pedagogy. The book is filled with a wealth of practical ideas, possibilities, and thoughts about what practitioners might do differently in classrooms and educational institutions if we begin to think differently about violence.

I

CANARIES IN THE MINE

1

Introuction

I’m just realizing that the violence is so big and the situation is so great that if it were happening to some other group, if it were happening in some other country, it would be called genocide…. If it was an occasional thing it would be terrible. But because it happens every day to so many women it’s ordinary. And I just keep getting struck by the sense that people aren’t paying any attention to it because it’s so ordinary. I keep thinking, “Well, I just have to tell them, because if I tell them they’ll do something about it.”

—Evelyn Battell, literacy instructor from British Columbia¹

I used to teach a class for welfare women, 98% of whom had either been in abusive relationships and gotten out, or were still in them.
The figures for the women in my class that had come from a background of childhood violence or abuse were horrifying—100% (there were 20 women in my class).

—Beth Crowther, coordinator, ESOL project, Texas

In 1986, when I interviewed women in Nova Scotia about their experience of limited illiteracy, many of the women talked about experiences of violence in their lives.² I am ashamed to admit that initially I saw this information as irrelevant to my study. When time was short, I would encourage women to move on from these stories to speak about the experience of literacy practices in their lives. Later, as I listened to the interview tapes and heard over and over again about experiences of violence, I began to question the connections between these experiences of violence and their literacy learning as children and adults. The women in Nova Scotia spoke of childhood violence at home and in school and of violence as adults living with violent men. In the context of that study, I began to see a broad range of violence as the backdrop against which I was examining the promise of literacy. Ten years after interviewing women for that research, I shifted to a direct focus on these issues—moving the issue of violence to the foreground and examining learning in light of it.

I have been particularly influenced in this shift by my experience tutoring one literacy student. I began working with her in 1990 and have previously described the beginnings of this tutoring:

Several years ago, when a woman from the women’s literacy group I was facilitating called me to apologize for speaking about her unhappy childhood in our last group session, I said she had no need to apologize. This was the beginning of a relationship I had no experience to handle. This woman had never told anybody else about her childhood. This telling, and my acknowledgement that it was fine that she spoke of it, led to a difficult process where she at first wanted to tell me the horrors of her childhood and wanted more and more of my time and my support. I kept backing off and then feeling bad—scared that she was asking more of me than I could give, but unwilling to let her down. Finally I suggested that I could try to give her support through a regular meeting where she could speak, read and write about her memories of childhood and the abuse she experienced then. She decided to meet with me and we began a long process of negotiating how we would work together, which evolved into a special kind of tutoring situation. (Horsman, 1994a, p. 56)

Working closely with this learner—I call her Mary in my writings (1994a, 1995, 1996)—I noticed many features of her literacy learning and participation in a literacy program; I began to question to what extent these features resulted from her experiences of violence. Observing Mary also led me to observe similarities in the learning and participation of other learners, and to question whether programs and instructors should be working differently with learners, taking into account impacts of violence on learning and participation. The more I have talked and written about these issues, the more I have found that other literacy workers are also asking similar questions.³

Increasingly, conversations have also included teachers and trainers in other settings—from elementary school to university—all talking about difficulties they recognize and questioning what they might do differently if they, and the institutions they work within, acknowledged the impact of violence on learning. Educators expressed doubts about how to respond to learners whom they know, or suspect, may have experienced violence in their lives. This research was directly prompted by my desire to collect information so that I, and other literacy workers, can learn how to work more effectively with Mary and learners like her. With the study completed, I realize we need to radically change literacy practice and apply these understandings to education at all levels and in all settings.

LITERACY, BUT NOT ONLY LITERACY …

It is particularly important to look at the impact of violence on learning in the area of literacy, not simply because there may be extremely large numbers of adult literacy learners who have experienced violence, but also because literacy learning is likely to work as a particularly strong trigger for memories of violence for many women. However, the effects of violence are not confined to literacy learning. Education at all levels is profoundly affected. Because literacy takes learners back to their failure to learn to read well as children, it may also take them back to memories of being a child—to memories of violence at home or school. Literacy learning may be the first return to a schoollike situation for many learners, and that, in itself, may be terrifying and lead to panic. Learning something that many assume should have been learned in childhood may pose a challenge to anyone—more so for a person struggling with their sense of self and low self-esteem—who may also have experienced violence or trauma.⁴

In the face of trauma, literacy learning is complex work. Literacy learners who have experienced violence in childhood—in the home or at school—find the horrors of their childhood brought back to the present when they return to the classroom and try to improve their reading—a task they first approached in childhood. Learners who have experienced violence as adults may have difficulty concentrating on learning. Deaf students and those with intellectual or physical disabilities are particularly vulnerable to abuse by those on whom they depend. Even those learners who have tried to escape the violence in their lives and see learning as a means to move forward may find that the cycle of violence continues. First Nation students bring the legacy of residential schooling with them to their learning, even those who did not experience it directly. Students who seek to escape violent relationships often find the violence escalates when they begin to attend school. For some, the classroom may be the only safe place they experience. For others, that too may be dangerous, as they are exposed to harassment and put-downs by other students and even teachers. The whole range of violence in learners’ lives is vividly present in the classroom, affecting the possibilities of successful learning for large numbers of students.

Literacy learning is an acute example of problems that occur whenever people try to learn and teach; it is not the only learning where the experience of violence creates an impact. My research included also Adult Basic Education (ABE), upgrading and job-readiness teachers, teachers of English to speakers of other languages, and, unintentionally, university and college instructors and staff. During an online seminar, Mary J. Breen described the demands on all instructors:

… all teachers deal with violence in their work because violence is an issue for everyone in this culture. For many people, a teacher is the only outside person they can talk with. I think of a good friend of mine who teaches in a community college. In any typical week, he hears stories such as these: a student misses classes because she was assaulted by her relative at a wedding; a male student misses weeks of classes because of a violent beating outside a bar by strangers; a young woman is always on edge because she has been stalked for a long time by an ex-partner; another student doesn’t finish his assignment because he spent days in court with his father…. My reason for stressing [this]is that I often hear people speak of the poor in terms of the violent, disruptive lives they lead—as if domestic assault and sexual abuse were issues only pertinent to “them” not “us”…. (Alphaplus Literacy & Violence Online Seminar,⁵ February-April 1998)

Unless the everyday presence of violence is acknowledged, teachers can only question how to teach and respond adequately. A university professor explained that the content of courses can bring students’ memories of their own experiences front and center, leading to disclosures she feels ill-equipped to cope with:

What happens usually is that students will come and talk to me, so there’s usually an increase in disclosures after a classroom discussion or lecture dealing with a topic such as colonization, structural violence, patriarchy etc. I’m not a counsellor. I can listen and I can suggest where people can go for help, but beyond that I can’t counsel. I often end up wondering how I can best deal with this. (personal correspondence, July 1999)

Not all instructors experience disclosures in this way; many may not be perceived as trustworthy or approachable and may never know why students do poorly in their course, leave a class quietly perhaps holding back tears, miss classes, or drop out. One college librarian spoke of numerous students who tell her their stories when they retreat to the library fleeing a class that disturbs them and leaves them unable to stay in class.⁶

Another online participant, Kathryn Alexander, a university tutor, explained:

I feel that the trajectory of violence and literacy has been a theme in many students’ lives—even if they are able to succeed and go on to university—it still affects them—mainly I have heard and experienced stories from women who are searching for means to make sense of their experience of abuse and survival in their own education—choosing certain areas for study—and then struggling with the institutional structures that may in fact mirror back the violence disrespect/control/or discrimination they have survived. (Alphaplus Literacy & Violence Online Seminar, February-April 1998)

Unless education at all levels acknowledges the violence in the lives of women and children, along with its impact on learning, many students will not only fail to learn, but may also experience the educational setting as a silencing place or another site of violence, where they are controlled and diminished by institutional structures or classroom interactions and shamed by their failure to learn.

BACKGROUND TO THE RESRARCH

A study carried out by the Canadian Congress for Learning Opportunities for Women (Lloyd, Ennis, & Atkinson, 1994a, 1994b, 1994c) identified violence as a major barrier to women’s literacy learning. Women involved in this research talked “about the pervasiveness and magnitude of violence against women” (Lloyd et al., 1994a, p. 107). Three women involved in the research taught literacy classes where every woman present had been sexually abused. One woman-positive⁷ activity, carried out as part of the study, involved a house-to-house survey in rural Newfoundland. As they conducted the survey, men sometimes refused to let the women even answer the survey questions. In a reflection at the end of the study, one interviewer summed up what they had learned:

On every page of every questionnaire we see violence, poverty, and loneliness. The despair in the young women especially is loud and clear. They are in situations that make life seem hopeless. They either don’t know they have choices or they don’t want to leave the situation—we don’t really know. Or do they really have choices? (Ennis et al., 1994, p. 81)

For the most part, little is written or said about links between violence and literacy. Some have suggested that, as a first step to changing this, a study is needed to look at whether there are higher statistics of violence in the lives of adult literacy learners than in the general population. Accounts of literacy workers who have discovered that all, or most, of the students in a class have experienced sexual or physical abuse as children certainly suggest that such a study might reveal that horrifyingly high numbers of adults, both women and men, in literacy programs experienced abuse as children. In an earlier article, I speculated that children dealing with abuse might be expected to have had difficulty concentrating on learning to read:

If she was being severely abused as a child, either sexually, emotionally or physically, what was her experience of trying to learn to read? An enormous amount of energy would have been needed to survive, to bury what was happening to her even from her own consciousness, to cry out for help in a myriad of direct or indirect ways, to continually monitor her world for her safety. For some, the experience of abuse may have led to them working even harder at school work, but for others the erosion of sense of self, self-esteem and self-confidence may all have interfered with the process of becoming a successful learner. (Horsman, 1995, p. 207)

Although people often ask me about the statistics, I decided not to focus on that issue. For me, the most pressing question is not how many literacy learners have experienced trauma, but how literacy programs can teach most effectively. Even if the number of women in literacy programs is no higher than the general population, we still need to know how to carry out literacy work and other education in ways that are effective for women and children who have survived trauma.

Statistics for the general population are high, and all evidence suggests that these figures minimize the problems. In 1982, Diana Russel reported statistics learned from her research “that 38 percent of all women are sexually abused by an adult before the age of 18” (Cited in Dinsmore, 1991, p. 2). The Badgley Report (1984, p. 3) concluded “approximately 54 percent of the females under the age of 18 have been sexually assaulted. The definition of sexual assault used here is sexual activity ranging from unwanted touching and threats of unwanted touching to rape causing bodily harm … Badgley shows that about 31 percent of the males of all ages have been sexually assaulted. The majority of these males were under 21 when the first assault took place” (cited in Mitchell, 1985, p. 88). Recent statistics obtained by Statistics Canada found that 29% of ever-married women have experienced wife assault. The report stated that “Over half of these women experienced serious assaults” (Statistics Canada, 1998, p. 3). Although no statistics separate out literacy learners, we can only assume that these rates are a minimum that applies to literacy learners and acknowledge that anecdotal evidence indicates the figures might actually be much higher.

A project writing curriculum for women in literacy and English as Another Language (EAL) programs made me aware of the need for systematized information about the issue from outside the literacy field and for collected information about the range of approaches within the literacy community. I wanted to know how other literacy workers were addressing issues of violence. What did they do? What tensions and contradictions were they struggling with? I also began to wonder what we could learn in the literacy community from therapists and counselors who address women’s experiences of violence directly.

The research study for this book was borne of my desire to begin the process of expanding awareness of and resources for literacy workers so that new approaches, strategies, and programs can be developed to allow more learners the chance to learn and participate effectively in literacy programs. In my proposal for funding, I argued:

If the impacts of violence are not adequately addressed in literacy programs there is a cost for learners, as they face barriers to successful learning; a cost to literacy workers, as they are frustrated by lack of knowledge about how best to support survivors in overcoming barriers to learning; and a cost to programs as a whole, as learners struggle to participate effectively as leaders sharing in running their programs. (CCLOW, 1996, p. 3)

As I talked to learners and workers, that frustration—learners who felt that their failure to learn proves they are stupid and workers who struggled with feeling incompetent as they question what they could do better—confirmed the need for the study and for changes in literacy work to follow from it.

This research⁸ looked at the impact of violence on women’s literacy learning and program participation to develop approaches to literacy work that will assist women to learn. It included interviews with literacy workers, literacy learners, therapists, counselors, and staff of various or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Canaries in the Mine
• Part II: Learning in the Context of Trauma
• Part III: Bearing Witness
• Part IV: Pulling It All Together
• Sources and Resources
• Author Index
• Subject Index