Children's reading habits: From the perfect book to social engaging reading environments. How a socio-material understanding of leisure reading and playful child-centred methods can inform practice

Children’s leisure reading is declining (Lund & Skyggebjerg, 2021). To prevent this decline, Kolding Library, four PLC’s (Pedagogical Learning Centers), Design School Kolding’s Play Lab, and University of Southern Denmark entered a collaboration funded by the Danish Agency of Culture and Palaces. Play Lab did the preliminary research using playful child-centred methods (Feder 2020) to gain insight into the children’s perspectives on leisure reading.
The goal was to conceptualize design guidelines to designers and artists to make prototypes for the libraries to enable children’s reading engagement and easier usage of the systems at the libraries. The child-centred methods informed the project about the children’s perspective on leisure reading, and we found that leisure reading as concept could be informed by a socio-material perspective where reading is understood as a socially engaging, cognitive and creative process involving materiality (Tanggaard, 2013; 2016). The children understood leisure reading as: “twenty minutes a day” based on guidelines from school. The goal-oriented, functionalistic, approach in school affected the interaction between the children and libraries. The children were concerned with materiality such as “cave”-like, soft, and calm environments and of being together with peers, sharing their reading experiences. When viewing leisure reading as a socio-material process it stresses the connection between the arenas of children and the continuity between school
and library. The child-centred approach allowed new perspectives on what was presumed to be “the problem” e.g., from finding the right book to creating reading environments where children can be together with peers beyond twenty minutes.