The research tools

appointees. She was considered a charismatic instructor, with knowledge and experience in the domain, as having connections in the new field and therefore as authoritative. Other instructional meetings or meetings to discuss the problems were not held during the project.

3. Organizational accompaniment: Several Authority employees on the status of women, whose main role was to afford a mediating, bridging factor solving mainly technical problems.

3.3.1 The research and research tools of informal pedagogy

Informal adult educational pedagogy uses unique educational practices that are based on group activity and the reference to tools such as discussion, conversation, and experiential experimentation. The educational practice focuses on learning from daily life, relying on the personal life experiences of each participant and on a reserve of personal tools she developed i.e. phenomenological instruction. This type of learning/teaching is based on the reality (actualization) and concretization instead of abstraction. In both cases a feeling of closeness and belonging is generated by the learner who increases readiness, responsibility and caring (Silberman-Keller, 2007).

This is "situated learning" (Greenfield and Lave, 1982; Lave and Wenger, 1991) that emphasizes the linkage between the individual and the group. The group serves as an educational resource and a main framework that structures and reflects mindedness and is an inseparable part of the educational process (Silberman–Keller, 2007). The group activity is characterized by the motif of developmentability that conditions the development of the individual and of the group as interdependent, together with shaping the learning processes that are adapted to the personal pace of each individual and of the group that are not necessarily linear but necessitate the learners to become partners (Greenfield and Lave, 1982; Silberman-Keller 2007).

The group becomes a safe space in which to be and express oneself, together with the feeling of equality that is generated due to a comparison between the subject under discussion in educational activity and the previous personal experiences, or with the knowledge the participants have. The conversation enables creating connections between the past and the present, the personal and the group, in a spiral process resultant from experiencing learning through coming closer and increasing distance from a given topic while applying diverse means (Silberman-Keller, 2007).

Since informal educational activity is directed towards educational goals as far as content and experience is concerned, these are, in fact, task groups with a rigid structure – the group was established for a defined known period of time to realize a goal or task. But they also enjoy a flexible structure, allowing starting and ceasing activities. Absence does not entail sanctions. The group can be disbanded into sub-groups for task-oriented activity and so on.

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Disbanding the group aspect of the learning session contributes to structuring the group identity, whose content also entails nurturing the group aspect. Within the group is a space that helps to develop personal identity together with social identity. Identity in itself is a social concept, since without the agreement from the surroundings the identity cannot survive (Yalom, 1995; Rosenwasser, 1997; Ullman, 2000).

According to informal pedagogy, the group, as a learning framework also shapes the role of the instructor or guide by employing organizational frameworks such as instruction centers that afford the headquarters where educational activity is planned (Silberman-Keller, 2007). It is important to stress that the feminist domain in Israel functions here without a guidance center and has no instructors of its own. It is assisted by a pool of existing instructors who also deal with content relevant to the status of women, together with other content and issues. This fact indicates that their level of knowledge in both specific issues and in work methods needs examination and differentiation.

Instructors/guides are defined as those who work with individuals or groups in the community in order to advance learning. Therefore they must be skilled in informal teaching–learning methods with shared conversations and activities (Jeffs and Smith, 1999; Doyle, 2001), able to process information in a flexible manner, to apply instruction and work with groups, manage projects, work in social networks and plan educational programs (Richardson and Wolfe, 2001). In the feminist activity, the work with the instructors is conducted on the basis of an employee external to the organization, so that apart from lacking a feminist agenda they are not an obliged to, capable of representing the organization in which they function.

Kahane (1997) defined the informal curriculum as including an outline for activity and interdisciplinary knowledge. The instructor's ability to work with a mosaic of knowledge is his/her expertise as an informal educator. This eclecticism is hard for instructors who come to the

feminist domain from other distinct areas of expertise (teaching, business management, psychology etc.) and without any training and adaptation to the world of feminism and informal work. The informal style of work is characterized by symmetry (Kahane, 1997) in spontaneity or unplanned interaction to situations created (Katriel, 1999)

Symmetry emphasizes the power relations between the educator and the educated as lacking coercion by the person with the knowledge. In reality instructors are found who outwardly declare openness and

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permissiveness towards participants' opinions and in fact work to strengthen the parts that are suitable to their concept of life (Bekerman, 2006) (as could be seen with three of the instructors).

The instructors enjoy a relatively high level of autonomy and it is therefore hard to discover the lack of coordination between their evaluations and their actual behavior. Most of the instructors do not allow outsiders into the group due to the procedural aspect of events in the group and due to it being a safe place for the participants, as noted previously.

This situation, together with the complexity of investigating the phenomenon, comprised of personal stories dictating the research tool.

The study relates to three points in time and to different search tools that were used for each step:

• Addressing and starting the course: Registering for and starting the course¹⁶⁵ the information was based on a type of basic questionnaire, a conversation that explained the course and a preliminary individual meeting.

• During the course: Using written and oral feedback (in the middle of, at the conclusion and even at intermediate sessions), reports of events from the instructors, closed questionnaires pertaining to a defined topic, summaries of activities and when it was possible written notes on the sessions by one of the participants.¹⁶⁶

• After the end of the courses through conversations, questionnaires, observation of behavior and its documentation or from a report by the participants /instructors regarding behavior or avoiding activity.

Some of the participants studied remained in the array of activity as participants in other courses or as running community projects that they initiated or joined (25)¹⁶⁷ Therefore scrutiny of the changes was

165 These are only direct empowerment courses.

166 . In another empowerment course that is not described in this study and took place with hearing impaired and deaf participants, a documentation process was conducted due to the need for making the material accessible to the participants, and therefore the proceedings were documented and distributed to them, to the instructor and to the accompanying staff and the advisor. This material was an alternative to the physical presence and served as valuable information for analyzing and drawing conclusions regarding the process, leading to the idea that such a step was also true for the other courses.

167 Some activists 'vanished' after a while or due to diverse events but at any given time there are 25 activists who afford the hard, even if changing, nucleus. There are participants who at the

conclusion of the courses returned to their activities and only after a while was the writer informed what changed in their lives and the connection between the change and the course

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also possible two years after concluding the course and in some cases even three or more years later.

The examination related to a comparison of two aspects:

1. According to the participants subjective perception (Fox, 2004) 2. According to the perception of another factor – friends, the advisor,

the instructor through actual doing or not doing.

The study was developed based on personal intuition, and trial and error.

The main tool used is textual analysis of written or spoken material that was transcribed that included:

1. Questionnaires

2. Official documents – summary reports, circulars, minutes of meetings etc

3. Course programs – including rationale, a short description of the course text and a profile of the instructors

4. E-mails – from instructors and students The transcripts include

1. Random conversations with participants, instructors, advisors, role holders

2. Intentional conversations in workshops that the researcher herself attended and taught

Another tool was the description and analysis of behaviors she witnessed, was partner to or became aware of through a third party.

In addition to the qualitative tools, a dialogue will be conducted with scales of measurement mentioned in previous sections such as GDI, GSI, GEM (Moser, 2007)¹⁶⁸ when the findings are analyzed. The data and the researcher's interpretive analysis have been concentrated in comparative tables that helped her to see the general picture or the absence of tools for reference.

The table is an attempt to construct standards that do not exist today for a comparative examination of content, products and behaviors. The researcher is aware that this standardization is artificial since the research area in which pertains to the world of content defined in the previous chapter as informal, or in organizational terms as a 'soft' world of

168 Gender Development Index; Gender Empowerment Measurement ; Gender Status Index etc.

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content¹⁶⁹. At the same time, she believes that a conceptual framework should be determined (every framework being a type of standard).

It is important to her to emphasize that she employed materials written for diverse and varied areas that she projected onto this study, feeling that they shed light on the study and on issues that arise in it. This use certainly employs concepts that developed in these worlds of content, respecting them even if they are taken from, or relate to, the patriarchal world (army, management etc).