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When I started teaching an adult literacy and language classroom in a small community centre, I was not prepared for the tensions and joys specific to working with adult literacy learners (ALLs). These learners were not a culturally, linguistically, or educationally homogenous group. They differed in languages, goals, cultural knowledge, and educational background. This is not an experience unique to my own context (Belzer and Pickard, 2015; Katz, 1997; Pettitt & Tarone, 2015); however, the current educational system aims to place and categorize learners not by the diversity of skills and knowledge they bring to the classroom, but by a singular deficit: their lack of reading and writing skills (Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks,  Continue Reading →