The main aim of the project was to develop, test and evaluate differentiated strategies for fostering reading for pleasure, targeting children aged 9 to 12, that would be based on the previously conceived typology (i.e. the reading profiles) of these young students, and carried out by trained public librarians (i.e. the reading motivators) via a set of workshops during school hours in the classroom or in the library. We hoped this would facilitate the incorporation of reading for pleasure pedagogy and reading for pleasure itself in the school-related context, offer support for the teachers, foster collaboration between schools and local public libraries and most of all provide some concrete tools for easier detection of different kinds of readers, as well as suggest approaches, props and activities that would incite interest in reading. Important part of that plan was setting up a theory and practice-based course, i.e. a training curriculum, that would equip (in our case) public librarians with knowledge and strategies of reading motivation for primary school students, as well as establish a profile of a reading motivator as such. All these outputs were to be offered as an open access online toolkit to allow further use.
The general motif refers to the recent global decline in reading literacy among the young, which has been strongly correlated with the decline in reading motivation, especially regarding reading for pleasure. In addition, qualitative research suggests that reading for pleasure is rarely associated with school, thus revealing the need for strengthening it within the school context, which would more likely enable a good reading experience for every student. However, since the teachers are often overburdened with their primary work, while on the other hand, students associate them with grades and not with pleasure-related activities, it is important to find ways of outsourcing reading for pleasure program by introducing external and properly trained reading motivators who could not only form different bonds with the students, but also bring new knowledge to the teachers, thus establishing cooperation between schools and public libraries. Further on, new approaches of reading for pleasure pedagogy are needed, that would take into account different profiles of the young readers and differentiate techniques of reading encouragement, making them suitable for the digital age of high competition among sources of leisure and pleasure.