ABSTRACT
Images of adult learners in adult and family literacy discussions demonstrate the range of literacies that adults use and the complex relationships associated with their experiences and identities in and out of the classroom. Gender is a salient feature of these experiences and identities, including adults’ (re)presentations of self, their social roles, and the contexts in which their gendered roles (as women, men, mothers, fathers, children, and workers) are assumed and enacted (Gadsden, 2002; Purcell-Gates & Waterman, 2000; Reder, this volume). Literacy programs—adult and family alike—are critical contexts for the enactment of these identities, roles, and expectations; they are as likely to be repositories for individuals’ struggles and tensions. Similar to a focus on the social markers of race, culture, and class, a focus on gender is important to understanding how learners approach, resist, or embrace literacy support and how programs, as a special context and sphere of influence, can create balance between and among adults’ sometimes competing gendered roles and learner identities. Gender, then, constitutes a provocative and useful lens into the lives of adult students and the ways in which adult learners shape and revise their purposes for literacy, their ability to sustain engagement in classroom practices, and their perceptions of what is possible for themselves and others in their social networks.
