by Leonie Rutherford | Mar 31, 2023 | Events
The team recently hosted a successful public panel at Waterfront Library, to share research and industry insights about keeping teenagers reading in an age of distractions. The event was aligned with the Australian Reading Hour, a national celebration of Australians’ love of reading hosted by the Australian Publishers Association. It was aimed primarily at parents and those who share books with teens.
Presenting on behalf of the Cultural Pathways ARC Linkage Team were Associate Professor Leonie Rutherford and Research Fellow Dr Bronwyn Reddan. Danielle Binks, YA author and literary agent, and Christine Oughred, from the Children’s Book Council Shadow Judging Project. The panel gave their perspectives on adolescents’ engagement with literature, insights about reading preferences, and tips about what to do, and not to do, to encourage reading.
Waterfront Library Public Event Area
The event which was held on Monday 27 April was a new partnership with Deakin Library as the first of the library’s public events program. The panel was recorded on video and will be available via the Teen Reading website and YouTube Channel once edited.
by Leonie Rutherford | Sep 13, 2022 | Research
Team member and Deakin University PhD candidate Anne-Marie May is researching how booksellers and librarians influence teen recreational reading at the physical sites of bookstores, school libraries, and public libraries. She takes a geographically located approach to investigate the sites of book culture and the networks between them that comprise a local reading ecology for teens. Anne-Marie has selected an inner-Melbourne local government area for her study for its distribution and density of secondary school campuses, public library branches, and independent bookstores, as well as for the cultural and socio-economic diversity of its residents.
Anne-Marie identifies and analyses intermediary practices that impact teen recreational reading from data collected in interviews with booksellers and librarians, and focus groups with secondary school-aged students. These include direct and indirect practices such as book talk, readers’ advisory, read-alikes, shelf-talkers, promotion of local authors, gatekeeping, displays, genrefication of collections, and book clubs. Affective labour underpins the practices of booksellers and librarians and is key to their networks. Anne-Marie’s work promotes understanding the commonalities and differences between the occupation groups, the barriers they face implementing their practices and how their specific positions in a localised reading ecology impacts their work with teen recreational reading. By doing so, her study aims to answer how these cultural intermediaries can increase their impact on teen recreational reading.
by | May 5, 2017 | Research
The Teen Reading pilot survey found that a higher proportion of students rated the provision of good books by their school library as a better motivator of more reading than local public or community libraries. While browsing the informative website of the Australian Association of School Libraries we were interested to find a recent study which investigated the differences in learning outcomes for schools with or without trained librarians. It found that:
Students are more likely to succeed when they have library programs that are well staffed, well funded, technologically well equipped, well stocked, and more accessible. And, the neediest learners may benefit the most from trained librarians and quality library programs.
by | Nov 22, 2016 | Research
In the UK, children’s laureate Chris Riddell, with the support of all eight former laureates including Quentin Blake and Julia Donaldson, has sent an amazing letter to the Department of Education to address current policy that has led to hundreds of school libraries losing a dedicated librarian over the last decade. To see this beautiful letter, click here.
