Teenagers and reading mediation in the school library

Abstract

The research investigated the mediation and reading incentive actions that are used by school library teams in order to train readers. The objective was to analyze the work of the school librarian who develops these actions in his way of operating, contributing to the formation of critical subjects and with a taste for reading. Methodologically, a multiple case study was undertaken, with a qualitative approach, based on the point of view of ethnographic theory. In data collection, the research environment was represented by three school libraries, one from private education, and the others belonging to the municipal public network in the city of Belo Horizonte - MG, which serves elementary school students from the fifth year onwards. Observation and semi-structured interviews were used for data collection, which had as research subjects the librarians and teachers who participate in these actions. The research found that mediation and incentive activities are effective when the mediator is a reader and remains open to continuous dialogue with his users and with other instances of the school. It was found that the most successful and long-lived actions of training the reader in the three libraries were those of mediation promoted by the uninterrupted meetings of the reading clubs, whose participants come together to share readings chosen by them, for the pleasure of reading. The analyzed libraries have mediation and reading incentive projects with the participation of teachers and librarians. The novelty was the presence of teachers from other disciplines, who proved to be great mediators of reading. It was also found what several authors in the field proclaim that librarian and teacher are trainers of readers. In the specific case of the research, they are knowledgeable about literature for children and adolescents, the authors, literary genres and, mainly, plan to share the readings, as a possibility to train critical and contextualized readers with their society.