Keleketla Library

Adult literacy is a crucial element of community and economic development in South Africa and many developing countries striving to meet Millennium Development Goals. However, few governments invest the recommended 6% of education budgets on programmes for adults. Without resources, volunteer educators and international supporters rely on their own creativity to generate project-based learning. Freirian pedagogy and the New Literacy Studies, which theorizes literacy practices grounded in the meaning of daily life, inform this study. This article documents a photovoice project for literacy development in Soweto, South Africa. The project was an initiative stemming from international and cross-cultural collaboration between two women, Geraldine Monama, the literacy coordinator at Orlando East library in Soweto, and Strawn, a community development and adult literacy researcher from the United States. We report what we learned from the project and details of the collaborative process to support similar efforts.