Promoting reading 1
This Government Bill states that there is no over
all national stakeholder that can initiate, coordinate and monitor reading promotion interventions outside the school. The bulk of reading promotion efforts are local, which means that the sharing of experience is not as extensive as it ought to be, that greater national or multi-regional efforts are not happening, and that reading promotion projects are rarely evaluated. In keeping with the enquiry into literature, the Swedish Government proposed that the Swedish Arts Council should be tasked with initiating, coordinating and evaluating reading promotion efforts of national strategic interest. During 2014, tasked by the Government, the Swedish Arts Council compiled a plan of action for reading promotion efforts outside the school, in collaboration with the Swedish National Agency for Education, the Swedish Agency for Accessible Media (MTM), adult education associations, and the National Library of Sweden (KB). The Swedish Arts Council’s remit includes distributing funds to reading promotion activities as well as initiating reading promotion activities itself. The Swedish National Agency for Education has begun Läslyftet (The Reading Boost) a major skills development intervention for schools, preschools and school libraries, aimed at improving students’ skills in reading comprehension and writing. MTM’s remit includes actively assisting in developing and improving access to literature and information for people with disabilities. Popular education associations conduct reading promotion activities, in particular for adults. The government bill Läsa för livet (Reading for Life) came to mean that some of the state aid to popular/adult education in 2014 was instead channelled into reading promotion activities. Regional, county and municipal libraries have been working with reading promotion for a long time – work that has become topical again due to the new Library Act among other things. County and regional libraries spend a significant portion of their resources on public library reading promotion, and in addition conduct reading promotion activities that directly target the public. The expansion of the Swedish Arts Council’s remit to include reading promotion allows scope for greater monitoring of interventions, as well as gathering and disseminating methods, evaluations and research in order to raise the standards of future projects. This knowledge review is part of that work. The Swedish Arts Council’s remit concerns reading promotion outside the school, but it is difficult to draw any clear distinction between reading promotion inside and outside the school, and it is probably not desirable either. Knowledge about reading promotion methods, understood as methods for awakening interest in and creating motivation for reading, is of course equally important inside and outside the school. Moreover, one could point out that public libraries and schools are united in a partially common mission: according to the curricula for primary and lower secondary school (Swedish National Agency for Education 2011) teaching should “stimulate students’ interest in reading and writing”. According to the new Library Act that came into force in 2014, public libraries are to “give particular attention to children and adolescents in order to promote their language development and to stimulate their reading”. In this context, we can also point to Swedish research that has stressed the pedagogical potential that lies in building on the culture and textual worlds that children and adolescents are exposed to outside school (e.g. Olin-Scheller 2006, Fast 2007, Schmidt 2013). A knowledge review entails a compilation of research and/or experienced-based 8