res

Ss and

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By Sophia Hussain (CUP)

A SCOTIA UNIVERSITY AND ge students are now being turned n for government assistance if parents are credit risks. A student ova Scotia was told last month she d be unable to appeal her student refusal because of parental debt.

Canadian Federation of Students

5) chairperson Guy Caronfinds this ngeous. ‘“Having your loan denied somethingyou’re not responsible like your parents’ debt, is simply ir,” Caron said.

Across Canada, student loans are

d on an assessment of student fi- ial need. Prior to this year, they

p calculated from the income of a

student’s family, with exemptions granted if the family was deeply in debt.

Under the new policy, passed by the government this summer, debtis no longer considered evidence of financial hardship.

Students who are denied a loan because their parents’ income is too high will still be able to appeal the decision.

By next year, most provinces are expected to implement this newpolicy, including British Columbia and Saskatch- ewan.

But it will make it even harder for students to fund theirpost-secondary education, according to Caron.

Parental contribution has always

jova Scotia students denied loans due to parental debts

affected students, but it is such a sub- jective criteria that it cannot be directly applied in assessing loans,’’ Caron said.

But if they [governments] in- sist on keeping that criteria, theyshould do it properly and make sure that par- ents arereally ableto contributeto their children’s education.”’

Last year, hundreds of Nova Scotia students were turned down forprovincial student aid because they were judged to bebad creditrisks. After protests, the provincial government stepped in andguaranteed their loans. - additional reporting by Tanya Talaga, The Varsity, and DionneStephens, Excalibur

Press news feature

iteracy and feminism -- reading between the lines

By Eugenia Xenos (CUP) INISTS HAVE SPENT DECADES ing inequality, poverty, bias and p authority. In recent years, they’ve gathering and organizing to fight a enemy -- illiteracy.

Is there a connection between acy and feminism? When up to 95 ent of literacy workers -- learners, Ss, administrators and researchers € women, when virtually no one has ied who literacy workers are, or work they perform, when this type ork is underpaid and undervalued,

woman learners are often mothers had to drop out of school to care heir children, the answer is self- ent.

One of the reasons that inalized people stay marginalized cause of education. Many binalized people tend to not have

S to the services and other institu-

that the rest of the population » and so literacy becomes very much

inist issue,’’ says Helen Thunder-

cloud, a Winnipeg cross-cultural con- sultant who attended the first feminist literacy conference at the University of British Columbia.

The 1992 conference brought to- gether 80 women involved in the adult literacy field from across Canada and was the birthplace of the Feminist Lit- eracy Workers Network (FLWN).With anglophone and francophone branches, the Network aims to be a national voice for women’s literacy. It also wants to support woman learners, promote femi- nist literacy research on topics such as women’s ways of learning, violence against women, and feminism across cultures and classes, and look into form- ing a union.

SEEING THE CONNECTIONS

Abooklet describing the need for FLWN says: ‘‘Many women feel silenced in literacy programs when they suggest program changes or attempt to put woman-positive programs and events

into place. They are often afraid to identify themselves as feminists, and experience negative feedback from col- leagues, administrators, students and volunteers.”’

Mary Breen, who is involved with the FLWN and works out of Toronto, says there is a reason why the women explicitly chose to use the often-loaded word, ‘‘feminist,’’ in the title of the new network.

We are feminists because a lot of us who are doing literacy work of one kind or another see the connection between literacy issues and other is- sues -- and so does feminism.”’

Breen explains: ‘‘A lot of the issues that feminism has addressed over the years, like women’s isolation, women in poverty, and access to edu- cation are the same things that we have to deal with every day in literacy work. Trying to trainwomen to be literatecan’t be done without first addressing all those other issues. It can’t be done in isolation.”

TIT MiLAARa Reta a Ri amend,

She says there was much debate over whether to use the word, and many women worried that it would alienate people. However, they decided that ‘‘feminist’’ best represented who they were and what they were trying to do.

But we’re not just interested in how wecan apply feminist practice, and certainly not about how we can make converts. A big part of what we’re doing is trying to support each other as feminist literacy workers.’ So far, there are about 120 women on the network.

Helene Blais, the FLWN francophone representativein Montreal, says the difference between a feminist literacy worker and the ‘‘average’’ lit- eracy worker is that ‘‘there is a sensitiv- ity towards problems that are particular to women. When you have that feminist dimension, it makes you take different action than if you were ina milieu where there was not a distinction made for helping women.”’

Although Blaisis a literacy worker

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October 4.1804