Introduction: A Reader, the Empowered Leader - Examining the Challenges

Abstract

The collection of papers in this special issue of PULA is a small sampleof the proceedings of the Pan-African Reading-for-All conferencewhose theme was ‘A reader, the empowered leader’. At the conference,leadership was conceptualized as implying the individual’s activeparticipation in a community’s literacy practices. Rather than usingliteracy to lead others in a literal sense, the literate individual leadsan improved life by using literacy to understand his/her everydayexistence.. The literate individual is empowered to understand, develop,and apply the skills, values and attitudes that are deemed valuable inthe community. At the community level, empowerment links literacy toissues of “citizenship, cultural identity, socio-economic development,human rights and equity” (UNESCO 2004:7), and helps to “transformthe lives of entire communities served by a nucleus of committed newliterates[…] thus fructifying local knowledge and the employment oflocal languages” (Easton 1998:1). In the face of new technologies,literate individuals are also ‘multi-literate’ (Kasper 2000) in several ICTliteracies. The conference reflected on all these issues. Similarly, as weapproach the target date of 2015, set by the UN for the actualization ofEducation for All (EFA) (UN Report 2007), the conference presentationsechoed the goal of EFA as an integral part of Literacy-for-All andReading-for-All.