Rural Reading Practices Across Generations: Working Class Males and Reading In The Intersection of Home, School and The Swedish Woodlands

This project aims to highlight continuity and change in the local, place-based reading practices of working-class males from Swedish rural woodlands, and to explore the significance of reading for their identity formations across three generations between 1950 and today.

Many males living in rural places have non-academic, working-class backgrounds, and typically invest in local reading practices that have been consistently marginalized in school in favor of institutionalized forms of reading.

Accordingly, rural working-class males may fail to recognize the relevance of school reading, with long-term negative effects on their relationship to reading in general.

Situated knowledge of reading and place based on readers’ experiences is important in the efforts to offer equitable education and may provide authentic contexts for extended learning beyond classrooms that connect education in school with communities.

The project runs over three years, adopts a life history approach and takes an ecological perspective on reading that links narratives of reading experiences told by three generations of males from five working-class families to places and historical changes.

The research group includes broad competencies relevant for the study of reading practices and rural contexts over time.

The project will make a unique contribution to reading research by facilitating nuanced descriptions of rural males and their local reading practices in relation to changes in schools and society.