In the centre of the Inhale Room are several tables arranged in a horseshoe shape on which sit more containers full of pens, sharpened pencils and scissors. A shelf on wheels is in a corner by the tall windows and contains a television and video player, along with a radio and audiotape machine. A flip chart stand holds a pad of large lined paper, the top page outlines a Monday Meeting agenda list written in thick blue felt pen. The handles of two roll-down maps of the world and of Canada are visible above one of the chalkboards. If you pull down that map of Canada and cast your eyes to the extreme left you can find Vancouver Island, but you will have difficulty seeing the dot that represents the small city of Duncan, the location of these two rooms that are the Reading and Writing Centre.

The Centre came to be through the initiative of the two teachers, Kate Nonesuch and Christina Patterson. They moved their fundamental English and Math classes, with about thirty registered students, from the university-college to a downtown site on Jubilee Street to help them further realize and enact their vision of a centre that would be learner-run.** Their extensive experience with adult literacy students, their political awareness, and their concern for more equitable power relationships propelled the move to better work towards their goals and to provide more opportunity for autonomy of students, teachers and the Centre itself. This study looks at the experiences of the people within the Centre in order to explore and understand what goes on there.

Significance of the Study

There are three significant and distinct elements of this research: the unique qualities of the research location, the theoretical framework and my personal impetus for this study's accessibility and relevancy. This study maintains that the Reading and Writing Centre is an efficacious adult literacy education environment which generates and sustains a strong sense of freedom, equity and community. There are few examples of adult literacy ethnographic research in settings that work to give opportunity for freedom and equitable exercise of power to students. Fingeret (1984; 1990) points out that research is often conducted in classrooms where there are unequal power relations between teachers and students. She explains how these relations contribute to practices that nurture and propagate the stereotype of incompetent nonreaders who are low in self-esteem and reluctant to take risks. Fingeret asserts that such research unfortunately usually ignores the limitations created by observing and interviewing adults in settings in which they are made to feel powerless and that the culture of adult literacy students is judged within the normative framework of the dominant group's cultural patterns. This includes the emphasis and value placed on schooled literacy and the unquestioned authority, power and privilege of the teacher position.

** Further details about how this move was accomplished are in Appendix D.