ABSTRACT
Training in the creation and production of learner and facilitatorgenerated materials (LGMs) has the potential to provide opportunities for self-expression. The level of reflection and self-expression in the women’s writing varied considerably. In north-eastern Nigeria many of the facilitators’ stories were impersonal community histories or folk tales. Stories by women reflecting on their lives, particularly unhappy lives, initially received disapproval. During one training course in Egypt two women facilitators chose to read out their experiences of how they had been denied education, demonstrating their own search for voice and identity through writing reflecting the same process that takes place in the literacy class.15 This writing also enabled men to comment on difficult issues, such as the psychological impact of seclusion on women and the difficulties men may experience when faced with competition between two wives. A few began to reflect that changes in the construction of gender relations offered some advantages for men as well as women.
