Chapter 6: Critical Problem-Posing: Removing Veils in Literacy Education for Gender Empowerment

This chapter aims at detouring the thinking of literacy practitioners to see possibilities of empowerment literacy, which are steps toward empowerment of women based on grasping the vantage points of differing realities. The acquisition of literacy to see and understand the world (Freire, 1970/1993), wherein learning to read was but the means to transformation, has long included the notion that it leads to the empowerment of the disfranchised, particularly women. In order to more appropriately inform our actions as participants and practitioners, this chapter re-poses core questions in the discourse on literacy. Critical questions need to be informed by disparate, lived realities of those for whom the solutions were created if they are to yield the desired results.