Shauna Butterwick

Deep Listening in a Feminist Popular Theatre Project: Upsetting the Position of Audience in Participatory Education

Investigating the participatory, collaborative, and conflictual character of learning within feminist coalitions was the focus of an interdisciplinary community-based project that used popular theatre as the methodology. Popular theatre, with its creative approach to analyzing, naming, and acting on problems and working creatively with conflict, created a unique opportunity to enrich and complicate ones understanding of deep listening—an embodied and active stand-point for speaking and listening across difference. This article outlines some of the deeper under-standings about feminist politics, theatre processes, and the creation of democratic sites of learning that emerged from this study. The authors focus on theatre processes that created new opportunities for high-risk storytelling and deep listening. Insights from this study can be applied to the learning processes of movements for social justice, particularly feminist coalitions, and to the ways the participatory process and democratic intent of adult education class-rooms are understood.

The road to employability through personal development: a critical analysis of the silences and ambiguities of the British Columbia (Canada) Life Skills Curriculum

This paper offers a critical discourse analysis of a life skills career education curriculum for schools in British Columbia, Canada. This curriculum calls for the development of a set of life skills that are positioned as central to students’ employability. At the heart of the curriculum is a focus on personal development, in particular, the need for students to develop self understanding and learn from role models how to face and conquer adversity. This paper builds on existing criticisms of how notions of employability and life skills have displaced policy orientations and interventions that might address structural problems of unemployment, with a personal development orientation that places the burden of change and adaptation entirely on individual workers. The goal of this inquiry was to illuminate the assumptions and the underlying ideological terrain giving shape to this curriculum. Informed by the critical frameworks of Nancy Fraser and Ulrich Beck, as well as critical curriculum scholars, this inquiry found a number of disturbing silences and ambiguities in the personal development orientation. On the one hand, the lessons acknowledged the significance of emotions in students’ lives and the possibilities for students to learn from family, community and the wider society. On the other hand, the emphasis on individual responsibility and a heroic orientation to transcending adversity reflects the dominant neo‐liberal ideology wherein future employment depends on having the ‘right’ attitude and making the right choices – contextual and systemic factors fall away. Life skills curricula, like the one examined in this project, are important sites of investigation for they reveal the major shifts that have occurred in the political economy of career and worker education.

Re/searching speaking and listening across difference: Exploring feminist coalition politics through participatory theatre

This article documents insights that emerged from a feminist community-based research project utilizing popular theatre principles and techniques to explore the politics of feminist coalitions. The embodied and relational aspects of speaking and listening across difference are examined, as are the contributions theatre can make to working creatively with conflict.

Hard/Soft, Formal/Informal, Work/Learning: Tenuous/Persistent Binaries in the Knowledge-Based Society

Purpose – This paper discusses insights from a study of women working, or seeking or preparing for work, in the information technology (IT) field. At issue is how and whether alternative career pathways and informally acquired skills and knowledge, as well as the operation of gender in learning and work, are acknowledged by employers, colleagues and participants themselves.Design/methodology/approach – Using the qualitative technique of life and work history, this study mapped varied learning pathways of women working in the IT field. We used a feminist approach to explore this field, which is characterised as both highly masculine and filled with opportunities for all workers, including women.Findings – Juxtaposing categories present in the data, such as female and male, formal and informal education, work and learning, hard and soft skills, and centre and periphery, we establish that binary constructs are both persistent and tenuous.Research limitations/implications – Our analysis challenges assumptions...

After the death of a friend: young men's grief and masculine identities.

Young men can have an uncomfortable relationship with grief. Socially constructed masculine ideals dictate that men be stoic in the aftermath of loss, most often expressing their sadness and despair as anger. Perhaps because of alignment to such masculine ideals little research has been done to explore young men’s grief – and chronicle the ways they think about loss, their responses and how they go about describing their identities after a tragic event. Using qualitative individual interviews and photo elicitation methods, we investigated the ways in which 25 men aged 19–25 grieved the accidental death of a male friend. The study was conducted from April 2010–December 2011. Causes of death were diverse, and included motor vehicle accidents, adventure sports, drug overdose and fights. The findings revealed men’s predominant grief responses as emptiness, anger, stoicism and sentimentality. Participants’ description of their grief responses illustrated the ways in which they struggled to reconcile feelings of vulnerability and manly ideals of strength and stoicism. We gained insight into men’s grief practices by looking at the ways in which they aligned themselves with a post-loss masculine identity. These identities, which included the adventurer, father-figure and the lamplighter, revealed gender-specific processes through which men understood and actively dealt with their tragic loss. The results offer novel insights to men’s grief and identity work that may serve to affirm other men’s experiences as well as guide counselling services targeted to young men.

L/earning a Living: Practices and Recognition of Women's On-the-Job and Informal Learning in the Information Technology Field

Information technology (IT) has been characterized as central to globalization and nation‐states’ competitive edge in the global economy. A highly masculinized field, IT is paradoxically characterized as gender‐neutral, a field which expands opportunities for women’s career and income development. For these reasons, feminist researchers regard it as an interesting context in which to explore contemporary issues of gender, learning and work. Based in Canada, our study broadens the scope of the literature in this area, extending the conceptualization of the IT field beyond its central occupations such as computer programming, software engineering and network administration, to niches such as technical communication, project and operations management and even librarianship and secretarial jobs. In this article, we focus on how gender has shaped the learning pathways and the politics of recognition experienced and articulated by women working across the IT field. We have purposefully gathered work and learning histories of women without formal IT credentials. Their stories offer an important counter‐narrative to the neo‐liberal discourse of equality and re‐insert informal learning into the mainstream discourse of lifelong learning.

Conversations from Within: Critical Race Feminism and the Roots/Routes of Change

This chapter explores our personal encounters with community-university engagement (CE). Using Critical Race Feminist Theory (CRFT) and Critical Whiteness Studies, we seek to illustrate the interconnection of racism, sexism, and classism and how these underpin the dominant charity model of CE. An autobiographical approach informs this discussion, a method of counter-storytelling which legitimizes the voices of women of color and White feminist allies speaking about social injustice. As a racialized administrative staff member and doctoral student, and a White professor in a University in Canada, we offer our narratives and critical reflections of the politics of privilege and exclusion. We conclude that the reproduction of the dominant charity model is closely associated with the Whiteness of higher education institutions which also creates barriers to bringing an anti-racist and anticolonial approach to CE.

The Power of Popular Education and Visual Arts for Trauma Survivors' Critical Consciousness and Collective Action.

How can visual arts and popular education pedagogy contribute to collective recovery from and reconstruction after trauma? This question framed the design and delivery of the Trauma Recovery and Reconstruction Group (TRRG), which consisted of 12 group sessions delivered to clients (trauma survivors) of the Centre for Concurrent Disorders (CCD) in Vancouver, Canada. Data were generated through individual and group interviews, observations (field notes) and creation of visual images. The use of popular education and visual art methods proved to be a powerful approach to deepening understanding and taking action. Participants learned how the delivery of mental health services, as well as acting as systems of exclusion organized around gender, race and class, were implicated in their (re)traumatization. Through the popular education process, participants also identified actions that could enhance their collective recovery and reconstruction. Implications arising from the study include the need for ongoing contextually oriented assessment to accurately determine states of health and stress, and the value of collective popular education and visual arts methods for clinically based trauma related psycho-education.

Working the Margins of Community-Based Adult Learning

This volume gathers stories about how various art and creative forms of expression are used to enable voices from the margins, that is, of underrepresented individuals and communities, to take shape and form. Voice is not enough; stories and truths must be heard, must be listened to. And so the stories gathered here also speak to how creative processes enable conditions for listening and the development of empathy for other perspectives, which is essential for democracy. The chapters, including some that describe international projects, illustrate a variety of art-making practices such as poetry, visual art, film, theatre, music, and dance, and how they can support individuals and groups at the edges of mainstream society to tell their story and speak their truths, often the first steps to valuing one’s identity and organizing for change. Some of the authors are community-based artists who share stories thus bringing these creative endeavors into the wider conversation about the power of arts-making to open up spaces for dialogue across differences. Art practices outlined in this book can expand our visions by encouraging critical thinking and broadening our worldview. At this time on the earth when we face many serious challenges, the arts can stimulate hope, openness, and individual and collective imaginations for preferred futures. Inspiration comes from people who, at the edges of their community, communicate their experience.

Transformative learning of mentors from an immigrant workplace connections program

ABSTRACT Mentorship programs have been deployed within immigrant and settlements services to integrate newcomers to the Canadian labor market. These programs are often assessed for their impacts on immigrant mentees. Little attention has been paid to how they may have influenced mentors. In this context, this study, from the perspective of transformative learning, examines the experiences of 19 mentors who were involved in a mentorship program designed to enhance the employment prospects for immigrant professionals in Canada. Findings indicated that in the process of mentoring immigrants with diverse backgrounds, mentors engaged in both informational and transformational learning. Through informational learning, the mentors expanded their cultural and work-related knowledge, hence their life horizons. For some mentors, their learning was also transformational. Some developed new awareness of and relation to the self. Some also started recognizing the structural and cultural barriers facing newcomers, and sometimes taking actions to effect social change. Both kinds of learning – informational and transformational – we argue, may contribute to disrupting relations of inequality between newcomers and the host society. The study suggests ways through which mentoring programs can contribute to a two-way process of integration involving changes and learning for both newcomers and the host society.