My work with people involved in adult literacy research in practice helped considerably to maintain this balance. My connections with researchers in North America and the United Kingdom served as a strong support to this research through peer reviews, in the form of verbal and written feedback, that served as a sounding board for my ideas. My conference presentations and journal articles initiated valuable conversations with others and opened up community connections within the literacy research culture.

Researcher Shifts

Throughout this research process, I experienced my own struggles with autonomy, power, and sense of community, as well as studying and analyzing these concepts from the researcher role. The sharing of this process is another tool for analyzing power and autonomy. I am in full agreement with Orner (1992) that "[i]n education, the call for voice has most often been directed at students. Where are the multiple, contradictory voices of teachers, writers, researchers and administrators? The time has come to listen to those who have been asking others to speak" (88).

My inexperience with research and my fervent desire to contribute to social change made for high ideals while planning this research. I had to learn about the big gaps between my visions of what was possible and what I could realistically accomplish in four months of fieldwork. An excerpt from my personal journal expresses my early idealism:

I am keenly interested in working out ways to work with literacy learners on this project - to explore their concerns and agendas in relation to power/authority issues, to develop key questions, problem and issues out of the "data" of their stories.

Until I became more familiar with the institutional requirements for Masters' student thesis research, the nature of the Centre and the time limitations of my fieldwork, I continued to believe that I could develop my research design with the people of the Centre. As I became familiar with the university research regulations, time limitations and ethics review boards, I found I had to change my original dreams of that kind of collaborative research. I learned to adapt and shift my original plans as I began to understand and create my place as researcher/ethnographer in the adult literacy field through experiencing the realities of working in the field.