Public Libraries

This piece examines the relationship between basic competencies, lifelong learning, and public libraries in Latin America, situating the library as a first-line educational infrastructure operating within conditions of structural inequality and persistent crisis. It begins by redefining the category of "public library" to include both state-run systems and community-based initiatives, treating them as parallel and functionally equivalent networks that respond to unmet social needs. In many Latin American contexts, community libraries emerge precisely where public provision proves insufficient, generating locally adapted solutions and often surpassing formal systems in flexibility and responsiveness.

Public libraries are characterized as institutions with an unusually broad and heterogeneous user base, occupying a frontline position between citizens and information. Their educational role is framed as central to their social mandate, extending beyond formal schooling into informal and non-formal education. The text emphasizes the importance of sustained community assessment and context-specific planning in order to support lifelong learning, drawing on approaches such as action research, evidence-based practice, and grassroots development methodologies. Educational support includes basic literacy, school reinforcement, vocational training, information literacy, and access to essential information related to health, employment, citizenship, and resource management.

A distinctive feature of the analysis is its treatment of "crisis" as a near-permanent condition in the region. Rather than designing temporary emergency responses, many libraries operate within environments marked by endemic economic instability, political volatility, natural disasters, and social fragmentation. In this context, adaptive capacity, creativity, and solidarity become structural competencies. Digital literacy initiatives are discussed in relation to the profound digital divide affecting much of Latin America, highlighting disparities between well-funded national networks and precarious community units that must work with minimal technological resources.

The text also documents a wide range of targeted interventions addressing specific sectors, including children and youth, women, Indigenous peoples, campesino communities, displaced populations, and urban marginalized groups. Through examples drawn from Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Argentina, and other countries, the analysis demonstrates how public libraries integrate literacy promotion, intercultural education, community radio, mobile library services, bilingual programming, and cultural recovery projects into broader strategies of social inclusion. In doing so, libraries frequently function as multifunctional community hubs, combining educational, cultural, archival, and communicative roles.

Significant attention is given to structural challenges: fluctuating funding, limited professional training, politicization of state institutions, fragmentation across national systems, and insufficient coordination between academic training and practical realities. The text argues that librarians require competencies that exceed traditional bibliographic skills, including the capacity to evaluate community needs, respond to complex social situations, design inclusive programs, and maintain dialogue across institutional and grassroots networks.

Rather than portraying these interventions as marginal or symbolic, the text presents them as constitutive of public librarianship in the region. In highly diverse and unequal societies, public libraries become informational arms of their communities, mediating access to knowledge, fostering continuous learning, and accompanying citizens through processes of adaptation and change. Their effectiveness is measured less by technological sophistication or formal metrics than by their ability to provide relevant tools at critical moments and to sustain meaningful relationships with the communities they serve.

This article proposes an ecological and critical approach to public library management in Latin America, especially in rural, urban, and community contexts marked by precarity, institutional fragility, and social inequality. It questions technocratic models that understand libraries mainly through standardized indicators such as loans, connectivity, efficiency, and service performance, arguing that these frameworks often fail to register the forms of value that actually sustain libraries in vulnerable territories: trust, continuity, learning, rootedness, conversation, and community recognition. Against the image of the library as a service machine or static repository, the text conceptualizes it as a living cultural ecosystem that exchanges, processes, and transforms information, relationships, and meanings in constant interaction with its environment.

Drawing on ecological and systems thinking, the article develops three operational processes for understanding institutional vitality: breathing, circulation, and regeneration. Breathing refers to the library's capacity to listen to its surroundings, remain open to local languages, oralities, experiences, and needs, and allow the community to modify its direction. Circulation describes the flow of meaning generated through loans, workshops, conversations, encounters, and shared practices, beyond the reduction of library work to administrative procedures. Regeneration names the institution's ability to repair, reorganize, learn, care for its staff and spaces, document its experience, and preserve the memory of its own processes.

The article links this ecological model to critiques of epistemic coloniality, the monoculture of knowledge, critical librarianship, and an ethics of care. It argues that many public management models imported into Latin America reproduce forms of epistemic dependency by imposing uniform standards on heterogeneous territories. In response, the living library is presented as an institution whose legitimacy does not derive from imitation or standardization, but from coherence with the territory in which it exists. Library management, in this framework, is not merely the administration of resources, but a situated practice of learning, adaptation, and collective maintenance. A sustainable library is therefore not one that simply persists unchanged, but one that remains meaningfully aligned with the life around it.

This text presents a critical review of Los servicios bibliotecarios multiculturales en las bibliotecas públicas españolas by Fátima García López, situating the discussion within broader debates on multicultural librarianship, institutional neutrality, and the ideological dimensions of professional practice. While acknowledging the descriptive rigor and extensive documentation of the work under review, the text moves beyond summary to interrogate the conceptual foundations underlying the notion of "multicultural library services" and the normative frameworks that shape it.

The review notes that García López's study offers a systematic overview of theoretical definitions, legislative contexts, and international guidelines — particularly those issued by IFLA and ALA — alongside an examination of Spanish public library experiences. However, it underscores that such normative discourse, often presented as technically neutral, carries implicit ideological assumptions. The term "multiculturalism" itself is treated as historically situated and politically charged, emerging from specific sociopolitical contexts tied to migration management and integration policies. In this light, multicultural services risk being framed as specialized interventions directed at "others," rather than as structural reconfigurations of the institution as a whole.

A central concern articulated in the text is the semantic and practical ambiguity of "multicultural services." In many professional discussions, the expression tends to denote targeted programs for immigrant or minority populations, thereby reinforcing distinctions between a presumed normative majority and culturally differentiated groups. The review questions whether such labeling inadvertently perpetuates forms of symbolic segregation, where diversity is acknowledged but contained within designated services rather than integrated into the core identity of the public library. The issue is not the provision of culturally responsive services per se, but the conceptual framing that situates cultural plurality as an exception requiring special treatment.

The analysis also engages with the broader question of professional neutrality. It argues that librarianship, like any discipline, is embedded in ideological, political, and social contexts, and that appeals to neutrality may obscure underlying value systems. International guidelines and policy documents, while valuable, are not immune to critical scrutiny. Their authority should not exempt them from examination, particularly when they shape institutional priorities, terminology, and definitions of user populations. The review suggests that multiculturalism, when adopted uncritically, can become a fashionable label detached from deeper structural transformation.

Rather than dismissing multicultural services, the text calls for a more rigorous conceptual debate capable of disentangling descriptive practice from ideological positioning. It proposes that discussions of diversity be grounded in the recognition that all communities are inherently plural and that public libraries must respond to this plurality as a constitutive condition, not as an add-on program. By encouraging sustained reflection on terminology, policy frameworks, and implicit assumptions, the text contributes to a more reflexive and critical understanding of multicultural librarianship within European and Latin American contexts alike.

This article offers a critical interrogation of the concept of "multiculturalism" in librarianship and reframes the purpose of the public library around the preservation of cultural diversity understood as lived, local, and structurally threatened plurality. Beginning with the deceptively simple question "what do we want a library for?", the text situates this inquiry within professional debates on infodiversity and the management of plural information environments, drawing attention to the responsibility of libraries to rescue, organize, and disseminate local knowledge, minority languages, regional memory, and subaltern cultural production.

Rather than accepting "multiculturalism" as a progressive or self-evident framework, the text traces its emergence within first-world policy contexts designed to administratively manage immigration and cultural difference. It argues that, in practice, multicultural library services often amount to the symbolic inclusion of minority cultures within a dominant informational structure that remains fundamentally unchanged. Multicultural collections risk becoming tokenistic additions to an otherwise hegemonic corpus, reinforcing hierarchies rather than dismantling them. Within Latin American contexts, the text suggests that the term becomes even more problematic, as it presumes the existence of culturally homogeneous "national" libraries in societies that are already deeply plural, internally diverse, and historically shaped by layered identities.

The argument shifts from policy critique to epistemological repositioning. Cultural diversity is framed not as an external supplement requiring special programs, but as the constitutive condition of any community. Every territory contains multiple linguistic, regional, occupational, generational, and ideological cultures. The task of the public library is therefore not to append services for "others," but to recognize that all users inhabit cultural positions and that library collections and services must reflect that structural heterogeneity. The text calls for a transformation in institutional vision rather than the implementation of compensatory multicultural policies.

Globalization and information capitalism are identified as contemporary pressures intensifying cultural homogenization. The predominance of English-language digital content, restrictive copyright regimes, commercialization of information, urban bias in knowledge production, and the marginalization of oral, rural, and non-official epistemologies are presented as forces that endanger infodiversity. In this context, libraries are positioned as potential safeguards of threatened cultural expressions, including regional traditions, minority dialects, socially stigmatized narratives, and alternative knowledge systems.

The text ultimately advances a redefinition of the public library as a house of collective memory, responsible for ensuring that the informational record genuinely reflects the plurality of identities that constitute a community. It challenges librarians to examine their collections critically and to confront exclusions embedded in catalogues, acquisition policies, and classification practices. Rather than pursuing superficial multicultural visibility, the proposed approach demands structural reorientation toward inclusive representation, equitable access, and the sustained preservation of cultural diversity as a condition of democratic identity.

This article develops a conceptual and policy-oriented examination of the relationship between public libraries, intangible cultural heritage, and cultural diversity, positioning libraries as custodians of fragile, living memory within plural societies. Drawing extensively on UNESCO frameworks concerning cultural heritage, diversity, and human rights, the text reconsiders established definitions of "heritage" in order to emphasize the centrality of non-material expressions such as oral traditions, languages, rituals, music, craftsmanship, social practices, and collective knowledge systems. Cultural heritage is presented not as a static repository of artifacts but as a dynamic process of transmission, transformation, and renewal across generations.

The argument distinguishes between material and intangible heritage while underscoring their interdependence. Intangible cultural heritage is defined as the ensemble of spiritual, intellectual, affective, and social traits that characterize a community and sustain its identity. Oral expression, threatened languages, traditional techniques, and ritual practices are described as particularly vulnerable forms of knowledge, exposed to erosion through globalization, acculturation, linguistic homogenization, and the dominance of mass media. In this context, the loss of language is interpreted not only as communicative impoverishment but as the disappearance of a worldview and a system of meaning embedded in grammar, metaphor, and collective memory.

The text further explores the relationship between identity and acculturation, highlighting how hegemonic cultural models, educational systems, media structures, and socio-economic pressures contribute to the marginalization of minority cultures and local traditions. Cultural diversity is framed as a condition for human creativity and innovation rather than as a problem to be managed. Drawing on international declarations that affirm diversity as a common heritage of humanity, the text situates the defense of plural identities within a broader framework of democratic development, intercultural dialogue, and human rights.

Within this landscape, the public library is reconceptualized as an active agent in the protection and transmission of intangible heritage. Far from being confined to the management of printed collections, libraries are described as spaces capable of collecting, preserving, and disseminating oral histories, community narratives, minority language materials, sound recordings, and documentation of traditional practices. By opening their services to marginalized voices and supporting intercultural dialogue, public libraries contribute to the safeguarding of cultural diversity and to the reinforcement of collective memory. The text emphasizes that access to information must include access to the cultural expressions and knowledge systems of all social groups, including those historically excluded from institutional recognition.

Ultimately, the text presents public libraries as "guardians of fragility," institutions entrusted with sustaining the delicate fabric of intangible heritage in contexts of rapid social change. Through documentation, education, community engagement, and the creation of inclusive informational environments, libraries can help ensure that cultural memory remains dynamic, plural, and accessible. In doing so, they reaffirm their role not only as educational and cultural centers but as key infrastructures for the preservation of diversity and the defense of human dignity within contemporary societies.

This conference lecture argues that Bogotá's libraries need to systematize, narrate, and communicate their own work in order to resist institutional amnesia, professional invisibility, and the fragmentation of the city's library ecosystem. Starting from the everyday labor carried out by public, school, academic, community, mobile, itinerant, and improvised libraries, the text presents librarianship as a form of social, pedagogical, cultural, affective, and epistemic intervention. These libraries often operate in contexts marked by inequality, displacement, institutional fragility, and precarious labor, yet they continue to sustain literacy, collective memory, local knowledge, civic participation, and community trust. The central problem is that much of this work remains undocumented, poorly circulated, or disconnected from broader institutional narratives, causing projects, methods, failures, and lessons to disappear when funding cycles end, staff change, or policies shift.

Against the reduction of systematization to bureaucratic reporting, the lecture recovers the Latin American tradition of sistematización de experiencias as a critical practice rooted in popular education, grassroots movements, and collective reflection. In this framework, systematization is not a form to complete or a report written for external validation, but a way of reconstructing lived processes: what was done, how it unfolded, with whom, under what conditions, with what tensions, and with what expected or unexpected results. It recognizes that practice produces knowledge, and that this knowledge deserves to persist beyond individual memory. To systematize library work is therefore to build memory infrastructure: a shared archive of experiences, methods, questions, mistakes, and insights that other librarians can consult, adapt, and continue.

The lecture also reframes communication as an epistemic practice rather than as publicity, marketing, or self-promotion. Communicating library work means giving form to what has been learned so that it can circulate, resonate, and become useful to others. The text insists that librarians do not need to be professional writers in order to write, but they do need to document what they know, because silence is too often mistaken for absence. Writing can begin modestly, through notes, reflections, voice messages, field diaries, short posts, internal bulletins, or collective drafts. Over time, these fragments may become articles, conference papers, toolkits, policy contributions, or archives of practice.

A key contribution of the lecture is its idea of a narrative continuum. Library knowledge does not need to move only through prestigious or formal channels. A WhatsApp voice note, a printed flyer, a Facebook post, a community radio segment, a blog entry, a conference presentation, and a peer-reviewed article can all belong to the same ecology of communication, each with its own audience, temporality, and function. Rather than ranking these formats, the text argues for their strategic use according to need, context, and reach. This approach defends informal, local, oral, and low-tech forms of documentation as legitimate parts of library knowledge production, especially in uneven and precarious institutional landscapes.

Finally, the lecture calls for understanding Bogotá's libraries as a diverse and asymmetrical ecosystem. Their strength does not lie in uniformity, standardization, or a single institutional model, but in collaboration, complementarity, shared authorship, mutual recognition, and the circulation of situated intelligence. Academic libraries, community libraries, school libraries, public networks, mobile initiatives, and informal reading spaces each hold different kinds of knowledge. A functioning ecosystem requires structures that allow those knowledges to meet without extraction or tokenism. The text's central claim is that libraries remain by telling: by preserving their processes, communicating their knowledge, and weaving dispersed experiences into a collective memory capable of sustaining future action.

This conference examines the relationship between libraries, Indigenous peoples, identity, and inclusion by arguing that rural and public libraries in Cundinamarca must move beyond institutional models that treat knowledge as something to be collected, classified, and administered from outside. It begins from the recognition that Indigenous, rural, and local communities maintained complex systems of memory long before the arrival of the modern library: oral transmission, agricultural practice, ecological knowledge, ritual, craft, naming, storytelling, and collective labor. From that point, the text questions the colonial structures that still shape library classification, metadata, access, preservation, and programming, showing how inherited systems often distort or reduce local knowledge by forcing it into external categories. Decolonizing the library is therefore not presented as a matter of adding Indigenous content to existing shelves, but of questioning the frameworks that decide what counts as knowledge, who has the authority to name it, and under what conditions it may circulate.

The lecture develops a series of practical and ethical shifts for libraries working with Indigenous and rural communities. It proposes moving from "inclusion" toward epistemic justice, understood as the redistribution of authority over schedules, collections, programs, signs, languages, access rules, and forms of description. It also presents the idea of living libraries: institutions that do not freeze memory into inert collections, but reactivate it through storytelling circles, community annotation, seed exchanges, sound archives, local vocabularies, and participatory forms of preservation. In this framework, memory survives through use, relation, return, and transformation, not through storage alone. The librarian's role shifts from custodian of objects to facilitator of relationships, from manager of information to mediator between institutional structures and living systems of knowledge.

The text also argues for practices of caring disobedience, memory as commons, access with refusal, and innovation through listening. Caring disobedience names the ethical need to reinterpret or resist external mandates when they do not fit local realities, especially when standardized programs, technological trends, or bureaucratic indicators ignore the actual needs of a territory. Memory as commons challenges extractive models of research, digitization, and heritage work, insisting on reciprocity, return, shared control, and community-defined conditions of use. Access is likewise treated not as automatic openness, but as an art of consent: some knowledge may be public, some local, some restricted, and some deliberately kept opaque. Finally, the lecture rejects the reduction of innovation to technology, proposing instead that the most important innovation in rural and Indigenous library work is listening: adapting the library's rhythms, tools, and priorities to the lives, seasons, silences, and forms of knowledge already present in the community.

Ultimately, the conference proposes a humble and relational vision of librarianship. It asks whether some communities may not need another conventional library at all, because they already possess living systems of memory through cabildos, resguardos, mingas, elders, rituals, and collective practices. In such cases, the library's task is not to replace or absorb those systems, but to accompany them, support them, and sometimes step back. A just library is not defined by the size of its building, the prestige of its catalogue, or the quantity of its collections, but by its capacity to resonate with the territory it serves. Its purpose is not to own memory, but to help it continue breathing where it belongs.

This conference proposes an ecological and critical framework for rethinking rural libraries in Latin America as living systems rather than underdeveloped versions of urban institutions. It begins by identifying a structural mismatch between dominant library management models and rural realities: frameworks based on efficiency, scalability, standardization, data-driven governance, and externally designed procedures are often imposed on libraries that work with precarious funding, fragile infrastructure, shifting community needs, and deeply situated forms of knowledge. Against this technocratic and developmentalist logic, the text argues that rural libraries should not be understood as passive delivery points for modernity, literacy, connectivity, or institutional programs, but as adaptive organisms embedded in local social, material, ecological, and epistemic environments.

Drawing on critical librarianship, epistemic justice, situated knowledge, systems thinking, and an ethics of care, the conference questions the neutrality of management itself. It shows how conventional evaluation metrics, professional standards, automation systems, and policy frameworks often reproduce urban, middle-class, and colonial assumptions about what a library should be and how it should function. In this context, managing a rural library is not simply an administrative task, but a form of mediation between institutional demands and territorial realities. Librarians are presented as contextual translators who negotiate between national policies, local knowledge practices, environmental cycles, community rhythms, and the material limits of their own institutions.

The text develops the notion of the living library through four core functions: communication, circulation, regeneration, and adaptation. Communication refers to the library's continuous dialogue with its users and partners, understood as the institution's form of respiration. Circulation names the movement of materials, stories, people, and practices beyond formal infrastructure. Regeneration involves care, repair, staff learning, process documentation, and the maintenance of spaces and relationships over time. Adaptation describes the library's capacity to respond to climate, migration, policy changes, and social transformation through professional autonomy and local judgment. Together, these functions propose an alternative measure of success based not on growth or compliance, but on vitality.

The conference also argues that rural libraries are epistemic institutions: they participate in defining what counts as knowledge. When they privilege only written, catalogued, and globally indexed materials, they risk treating oral, local, tacit, agricultural, ecological, or community knowledge as secondary or folkloric. A pluralist approach to rural librarianship would instead allow different forms of documentation to coexist: seed collections alongside books on botany, farmers' notebooks as records of observation, oral histories as metadata-rich resources, and community archives as valid knowledge infrastructures. The challenge is therefore not only technical, but political: to create library systems flexible enough to host epistemic diversity without forcing it into urban or colonial codes.

Ultimately, the conference calls for policy, training, and research frameworks capable of learning from rural libraries rather than merely regulating them. National systems should move from uniform procedures toward contextual principles; professional education should train librarians as mediators, designers, and interpreters of place; and research should support small-scale studies led by rural librarians themselves. The central claim is that rural libraries are not marginal, deficient, or incomplete institutions. They are alternative models of institutional intelligence, sustained through care, adaptation, and situated knowledge. To recognize them as living systems is to restore agency to librarians, epistemic dignity to communities, and theoretical depth to the profession.

This conference develops a critical and historically grounded reflection on the social role of public libraries in Latin America, situating information as a form of power and framing librarianship as an ethical and political practice embedded in long-standing structures of inequality. Beginning with a broad historical reconstruction of the relationship between knowledge, writing, and authority, the text traces how control over information has repeatedly reinforced social stratification, from ancient scribal elites to contemporary digital divides within the so-called "knowledge society." Information is examined not as a neutral resource but as an instrument capable of generating economic, political, and cultural dominance, while simultaneously offering the potential for emancipation, education, and collective empowerment.

Within this framework, public libraries are analyzed as institutions uniquely positioned to mediate access to knowledge and to intervene in contexts marked by structural inequality, poverty, exclusion, illiteracy, and cultural marginalization. The text articulates a progressive librarianship grounded in social development theory, drawing on international definitions of social development that emphasize equity, inclusion, human rights, and dignified living conditions. Public libraries are described as agents capable of addressing multiple forms of exclusion, including educational deficits, digital divides, health misinformation, cultural erosion, minority language loss, and barriers to civic participation. Rather than functioning as passive repositories or neutral service providers, libraries are conceptualized as dynamic social actors capable of contributing to literacy, lifelong learning, community memory preservation, intercultural dialogue, and the strengthening of democratic citizenship.

Special attention is given to the Latin American context, characterized by enduring socioeconomic disparities, urban marginalization, rural neglect, and uneven access to education and information infrastructures. In this setting, the public library emerges as a strategic institution for social transformation, provided that it abandons technocratic isolation and engages directly with community realities. The text emphasizes the necessity of understanding local needs, designing context-specific policies, expanding services beyond physical buildings, and integrating interdisciplinary approaches drawn from education, law, linguistics, and social sciences. Outreach, community partnership, oral tradition recovery, minority language support, open access advocacy, and critical literacy are identified as central dimensions of an engaged public librarianship.

The argument rejects professional neutrality as untenable in environments marked by injustice, asserting that information professionals inevitably participate in broader social dynamics and therefore bear responsibility for promoting equitable access to knowledge. Public libraries are framed as institutions capable of redistributing informational power, challenging structural imbalances, and fostering social development understood not merely as economic growth but as intellectual, cultural, and civic well-being. Ultimately, the text advances a model of public librarianship rooted in commitment and action, in which libraries function as instruments of social equity, community empowerment, and democratic participation within Latin American societies.

This compilation presents a series of practical reflections and micro-proposals designed to foster reading habits across different age groups, situating reading promotion as an affective, spatial, and relational practice rather than a purely instructional technique. Structured as a sequence of short thematic sections, it addresses the creation of reading environments, the articulation between literacy and reading enjoyment, strategies for book selection, reading aloud, children's reading clubs, promotional campaigns, and the use of narrative companions such as puppets or symbolic figures.

At its core, the text distinguishes between alfabetización as the acquisition of technical reading and writing skills and animación a la lectura as the sustained cultivation of pleasure, curiosity, and personal attachment to books. While acknowledging the institutional separation often drawn between formal education and reading promotion, it argues for an early and deliberate linkage between skill acquisition and enjoyment, so that reading is not reduced to academic obligation. Reading is presented as a lifelong process that extends beyond schooling and requires continuous reinforcement through meaningful experiences.

Spatial design receives particular attention through the concept of the "reading corner," conceived as a semi-enclosed, intentionally differentiated space within a classroom, library, or home. The reading corner functions symbolically as a threshold into another world, marked by comfort, accessibility, and visual distinction. Its organization challenges rigid bibliographic conventions by privileging intuitive classification systems, including color-based schemes, and by encouraging tactile proximity between readers and books. Portability is also emphasized, with suggestions for mobile collections that travel to schools or community spaces, transforming the library into a dynamic and inviting presence.

The text adopts a pedagogically inverted tone in sections such as "How to Remove a Child's Desire to Read in Eight Steps," exposing counterproductive practices that discourage autonomy, curiosity, and intrinsic motivation. This rhetorical strategy reinforces a reading philosophy grounded in freedom, choice, re-reading, and the recognition of the reader's rights, including the right not to read, to skip pages, or to abandon a book. Such principles reposition reading as an encounter shaped by agency rather than discipline.

Practical guidance extends to selecting appropriate books, organizing children's reading clubs, designing promotional posters, and conducting reading sessions aloud. Reading aloud is framed as both linguistic enrichment and relational bonding, capable of strengthening vocabulary, rhythm, imagination, and emotional proximity. Emphasis is placed on performance techniques, spatial arrangement, voice modulation, and post-reading interaction. Activities such as mock radio programs, peer recommendation roles, and participatory commentary are proposed as mechanisms to build interpretive communities and to connect reading with collective dialogue.

Throughout the text, reading is conceptualized as a temporal investment requiring sustained attention in a culture characterized by acceleration and digital distraction. The public library, implicitly present as the institutional backdrop for many of these practices, emerges as a facilitator of encounter between readers and texts, between children and stories, and between individuals and shared cultural references. Rather than prescribing rigid methodologies, the text offers adaptable frameworks that encourage experimentation, contextual adaptation, and the continuous negotiation between structure and play in reading promotion practices.