Women, Violence and Informal Learning. NALL Working Paper.

A comparative study of the impact of violence on immigrant women's learning was conducted among immigrant women of two communities in the Toronto area: the Spanish-speaking community and the Kurds. The two authors of the study each worked with one of the communities in which they had knowledge of the language. An in-depth, non-structured, conversational interview was used with 14 women of each group in order to document the life histories of these women as they experienced them. The Spanish-speaking women also participated in a workshop wherein they focused on learning about the law. All the women had been involved in violence, whether the mostly-domestic violence that the Spanish-speaking women had experienced or the political violence in which the Kurdish women or their husbands, sons, and brothers had participated. The study, reported separately for each group, found that the experience of violence places stress on the women that impedes their learning. The study also found that learning should be viewed as larger than just the learning of content--it includes learning to trust and act on their own behalf and take charge of their own learning. Some of the recommendations of the study included having peer-oriented learning groups to teach women about the legal system and the provision of legal materials in their native languages. (Contains 45 references.) (KC)