”Reading is one of school library’s legs.” : An empirical study of school librarians’ work with reading promotion focusing the relation between freedom and demand

This master thesis examines school librarians’ work with reading promotion, partly from Lev Vygotskij’s sociocultural perspective of thought, language, learning and knowledge development and partly from a reading perspective, which includes different approaches on children’s reading, in particular Aidan Chamber’s theory of the ”reading circle” and reading pedagogy. The main focus lies in the inherent conflict between reading for pleasure and reading on demand, which school libraries have to deal with in their mission of reading promotion, since they lie in between education department and culture department. The empirical study in form of qualitative, semi-structured in-depth interviews, was conducted with five school librarians and one teacher with responsibility for reading promotion from five different primary schools in Gothenburg. Research questions are how school librarians work in order to stimulate and promote pupils’ reading, which external prerequisites that have an impact on their reading promotion, and also in which way reading can be related to freedom and demand, which are described in the librarians’ answers. The main result of this thesis is that school libraries contribute to children’s learning and reading knowledge by offering voluntary reading for pleasure. The school librarian is also a guide for children to find their own reading identity.