Read: reside or insist? Teachers face reading

Abstract

Fears and certainties

I must tell you that for four years I worked with the Regional Center for the Promotion of the Book in Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal -CERLALC. Since 2004, the Ministry of National Education, in agreement with this body, and in coordination with the Ministry of Culture, had been carrying out a project called Thousand Ways to Read. The purpose: to encourage the use of municipal public libraries in educational institutions, to develop reading habits and communicative skills of students. For this purpose he undertook the task of searching and hiring fifty professionals and artists throughout the country. Contrary to what was believed, our work did not focus on the training of children and young people who, according to the SABER, SERCE and PISA tests, did not reach the expected reading levels. All our efforts should be focused on teachers. For CERLAC - as it became evident to me throughout the work - the low levels of reading and writing that the country registered with respect to other nations of the world, lay not so much in the students as in a lack of reading habits, convictions and pedagogical strategies on the part of teachers.