Building a Reading Culture

Building a Reading Culture on K-12 Campuses 

Jordan Mattox 

Merga and Mason (2019) review data from a group of the thirty schools in Western Australia to draw some modest conclusions about how to build a reading culture on these campuses. The data are interviews with teacher librarians describing how they have attempted to build reading cultures on their campuses. While the research finds a variety of factors integral to the construction of a reading culture, the paramount among them is administrative support, in particular in gathering support from the various stakeholders across the campuses, including but not limited to teachers, support staff, parents, and the broader community.

The article provides valuable insights in helping teacher librarians with the tools needed to develop their own reading cultures on campus. The qualitative data show the key links between administrative support and the success of the campaigns to enhance the culture on a campus. Some of the limitations are the lack of quantitative data to best evaluate the efficacy of the teacher librarians that identified success and the culture limitations of applying practice in a particular context to teacher librarians in other contexts.

Merga, & Mason, S. (2019). Building a school reading culture : Teacher librarians’ perceptions of enabling and constraining factors. The Australian Journal of Education, 63(2), 173–189. https://doi.org/10.1177/0004944119844544