Teacher-librarians leading change: Some stories from the margins

Abstract

This article comes out of a panel discussion of five teacher-librarians, all working in disadvantaged circumstances, which was broadcast to schools across the Western Cape Province, South Africa, with the purpose of motivating schools to set up libraries. Four of the panelists are students in the University of the Western Cape's school librarian education programme. The request for the broadcast came from two managers of the QIDS-Up school improvement project in the Western Cape Education Department, which has sent collections of books to over 400 historically disadvantaged schools across the Western Cape. The project's aim was to improve the prevailing low literacy levels with injections of attractive reading material.