As we wrap-up our project, we continue to consider how our assumptions about power and privilege played out in our research. This challenging issue has raised questions for future research.

• What does it mean to do research from an anti-oppressive framework?
• The research group was made up of 8 researchers, with a total of 10 facilitators, and was predominantly white, with only one researcher who identified as a woman of colour. Would acknowledging this and the other places we come from, whether that is speaking about race, culture, sexual orientation, religion, ability, education or class have helped us work through the issue of positionality and its impact on our research?
• By naming our power as mostly white, middle class literacy workers, would that have encouraged us to pay attention to the places where we, as researchers and group members, may be reinforcing oppressive structures and practices instead of challenging the status quo?
• How would we challenge the traditional researcher/subject power imbalance - particularly when most of our "subjects" are from marginalized groups?
• Would a discussion of power dynamics early on in the project have served as a catalyst for more critical research; and created a more open environment for all?

We came to appreciate our tensions on this issue as a strength of the group. One of our researchers, Mary summed it up well.

It seems that the more we can move in and out of frustration, anger, and openness - without censoring each other, or losing sight of the bigger picture, the healthier we are as a group. And the more honest and open we can be about the process, and our struggles (in our verbal report-backs and in the magazine), the more we will be able to pass on our learnings to the field.

Questions of positionality in research now seem to us very important, in part given our group's research experience, and in larger measure because what our group experienced is likely a significant issue to many researchers in the adult literacy field. Within an anti-oppressive framework, we could in the future endeavor to examine our positionality through six main lenses: racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, and class oppression. As Mary describes:

And as the field becomes more and more culturally diverse (as it inevitably will, at least in Toronto - in my opinion), we will all need to become better listeners, to shift our lenses, to really try to imagine what the world feels like from different perspectives, and to start to make visible some of the power dynamics that are currently "invisible". I imagine it sort of like a complex web of infrared light patterns that are invisible to people who don't have to constantly navigate their way through them.

But if you do, it's like you're wearing the goggles and the view is a bright spider web of entangled light beams, and it must be so frustrating to hear people say that they don't see anything, or that the web has nothing to do with the research - when they're exhausted from twisting and bending their way through.

F. Recommendation

Increase the capability of literacy practitioner researchers to identify and address questions of power and privilege in future practitioner research projects.

• Provide educational opportunities to practitioner researchers to help them better understand the dynamics of power and privilege, and how these dynamics can impact and bias research.
• Develop a set of guidelines, clear definitions/language and basic tools for use by practitioner researchers that would help them plan for and address questions of power and privilege in the project planning and implementation stages.