
Merging Categories and Distinctions:

on an Education Landscape
My teacher journey started in 1979 in community based education in the Ontario community college system. My experience, which began in a non-formal classroom situation both informs and directs my inquiry into how teacher identities shape and are shaped by the community college landscape in a changing world. The term non-formal is found in the adult education discourse where distinctions are made between formal, informal and non-formal adult educational contexts (Colletta, 1996). Alex, Larry, Jim and John are all students with whom I worked in assisting, guiding, modeling and teaching life skills and vocational readiness skills basic to finding and keeping employment. Each one of these students was referred to the program by either their probation officers or social assistance workers. The adult program they attended, Basic Job Readiness, was a variant of what Colletta (1996) describes as non-formal education:
Non-formal education emerged as a result of the realization that universal compulsory schooling, with its high costs and labour intensive characteristics, is not necessarily the appropriate technology for meeting the diverse learning needs of a developing society (p. 22).
For the first year and a half of my teaching career in adult education, I worked in contract positions at three different community colleges in both rural and urban centers outside the formal institutional structure. Church basements, storefronts and vacant office spaces were the homes for the community based educational programs in which I taught. Proponents of non-formal education believe that education in non-formal structures permits a “more diverse and flexible deployment of space, time and material” (1996, p. 22). Colleta’s distinctions includes the discussion that non-formal education includes a “relaxation of personal qualifications” for the educator (1996, p. 22). In the community college community based situation where I began to teach, teacher education was not required and Colleta’s argument was reflected. However, without training as a life skills coach and a university degree I likely would not have been hired.
I crossed Colleta’s distinction between formal and non-formal education when I moved from occupational and developmental programs into post-secondary teaching on the community college landscape. Essentially, the key distinctions were space and time, and in my earlier experience, I was definitely outside the “academic stream” in terms of community college curriculum subject matter. Our non-formal work with students took on an entirely different rhythm from most other parts of the college. We didn’t adopt the time tabling structures of the larger community college system and we designed our own class schedules. Since the Ministries of Colleges and Universities and, the then, Employment and Immigration Canada, funded our programs, we operated differently than most other departments in the college. One of those differences was that we operated all year round, including the summer months.
My stories of actual teaching experience across these distinctions, formal, informal, and non-formal, embrace the uniqueness of each.

An Approach to Becoming a Teacher:
in a Community Based Program on an Institutional Landscape
Though I sometimes refer to my OCAP placement as an apprenticeship to teaching, I can’t say for certain how much actual practice teaching I did. However, the sixteen weeks of student contact, group participation and direct supervision with my supervisors Brenda and Catharine, supported and prepared me for further experience and employment in sessional teaching contracts. These contract positions afforded me the opportunity to work alongside a variety of life skills coaches and experienced community college teachers. This initiation into teaching and working with Brenda and Catharine also separates me from my teacher friends and research colleagues, who, for the most part, are women who teach in elementary and secondary school systems. What I embraced as an apprenticeship feels outside the parameters of teacher education.
In 1980, following my work with Brenda and Catharine and after discovering my husband was also shaping another woman’s life, I left my two-year marriage and moved to a small city centre, taking on a sessional position as a Life Skills Coach. Leaving my marriage provided me with the freedom to take a teaching position at a rural community college, where I worked for one year. This position presented me with many challenges. One challenge was working alongside a colleague who I perceived as having a rigid value system grounded in religious dogma. My new teaching colleague kept her Bible by her side and I recall how her fingers skillfully leafed through the thin pages of her Bible. Each Bible reading, psalm and proverb was interpreted to the students, during, before, and after class with great certainty. I recall the difficult days of working with her, the sense I had of the power behind her position as lead coach, and how at first, I kept silent. As a young and new teacher to the rural college, I shared my concerns over long-distance telephone conversations with Brenda and Catharine. I wanted to import the pragmatics of my earlier teaching experience into my new teaching situation. Brenda and Catharine both listened to my frustration, and over the telephone supported me in working with the students in the class who did not seem to be under my new colleague’s influence. These students made themselves known to me, and with them, after negotiation with my new colleague, I arranged to teach life skills and job readiness in a separate classroom space.
Reflecting on my experience, I realize how highly I regarded my apprenticeship with Brenda and Catharine and the life skills theory and teaching methodology. The training I pursued in life skills coaching and the experiences of its application had been so richly meaningful by this point in my teaching journey that I was convinced of the methodology’s effectiveness. Through the life skills training I was introduced to the DACUM (Developing a Curriculum), an approach to curriculum that I adopted and maintained for many years (Adams, 1972; Conger, 1970).
On Brenda and Catharine’s invitation to return to teaching in their program, I returned to my home city. I joined them for only two months when I received a telephone call about a full-time sessional teaching position I had heard about at a community agency advisory committee meeting. In that telephone call I learned that I had been offered a sessional teaching position at a rural location and distant from another college’s institutional landscape. This was to be my third sessional teaching position in a period of a year and a half, but this time the position seemed to carry with it a sense of permanence. I was to become involved not only in teaching, but also in designing and setting up a vocational readiness program for adult students who were preparing for entry and/or reentry into the workplace.
As I reflect on the initial years of my teaching journey and experience, the patterns and unities in my teacher identity already begin to reveal themselves. I notice that my strongest recollections are about troubled students and how their personal lives entered the milieu of the classroom. I learned a great deal from these students and even as I reflect, they are still able to teach me.
My colleague Christina and I interviewed every student who came through the door of the program. Our intake interview consisted of a writing sample, math test, and application form, followed by an intensive interview. In the interview, we learned a great deal about each student, beginning with their past work and school history, their life situation, and why they wanted to enroll in the program. If the student was appropriate and, by our assessment, within the ministry guideline of being approximately sixteen weeks away from vocational readiness, their names were added to the waiting list. Christina and I split our class list in two and met individually in an informal counselling session with every student in the program. The program operated on a continuous intake basis, with students graduating on a Friday afternoon, and individuals from the waiting list taking their seats and beginning on the following Monday.

A Chance Encounter Informs a Teacher’s Learning Journey
I encountered a former student. Having just visited with a current student and her field supervisor, I was hurrying through a large suburban mall to meet with a thesis participant for the first time. The chance encounter was the genesis for me making the narrative connection among my stories of teaching experience.
My former student obviously recognized me, too, because when I turned to glance at him, I saw that he too, was looking over his shoulder. Even though I was rushing to meet my current participant, something pulled at me to ask him,
“Do we know one another?”
The tall, lean man, who looked to be around the same age as I was, took two strides in my direction. He was pointing his finger as if to jog his memory, and then he firmly said my name. Feeling relieved that I had not made contact with a ‘total’ stranger, I breathed a sigh of relief.
As with the other times these sorts of encounters happen in malls, on beaches or in grocery stores, my head swims with the possibilities of events, places, and times in which the person standing before me could fit. “Is he a past colleague?,” I wondered. “Perhaps he’s a social worker or a teacher? Could it be that we were in a workshop or a course together?”
Still feeling a little embarrassed, I asked the tall, lean man, “Where do we know each other from?”
His face was serious, and his reply seemed to hold an indignant tone. He replied, “B.J.R.T.” (Basic Job Readiness Training).
Recalling some of Mark’s personal struggles, I carefully asked, “How are you doing?” Shrugging one shoulder, he gave me a brief history of his work life. (He secured employment since graduating from the program, driving a bus for a large company.) I suspected he must have made a good vocational choice, as I pictured him driving a bus where he could engage with others on his own terms.
As the conversation, I thought, was coming to an end, Mark surprised me with, “That was some picnic, eh! At Mable Beach.”
I did remember, and agreed that the Mable Beach Picnic was indeed a good one. In my mind, it was one of best class picnics I had ever attended. I asked Mark if he remembered what year that was.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mark responded. “I do know it was the year of the teacher strike.”
- The first of the two teacher strikes that I remember humbly walking back and forth on the pavement, wearing a placard blocking the wind, that said,” QUALITY EDUCATION.” The issues were class size and teacher workload.

Tensions on the Landscape
Resonating with memories of the picnic, I think about Mable Lake, which can sometimes be mean and unpredictable. I recall the large onshore waves crashing into the breakwater. The clear blue water is the kind of cold that makes the calves of your legs ache, and typically it takes until August for the icy currents to warm. For years, my parents’ and community instilled in me stories about this lake’s erratic winds and the bitter currents beneath the blue surface – the white swarms of splashing waters over the submerged rocks. As part of the landscape, Mable Lake possesses an energy and excitement that seems to have existed among students and teachers I have worked with in the past. The lake is also a source of loss and sadness because the shifting winds have created such turbulence that even experienced canoeists have lost their lives. In a similar way that Mable Lake shapes the community, I wonder if a teacher’s sense of identity can drown in the waves of institutional tensions, innovative technologies, distance education, and the imposed classroom frameworks?