Collaborators or competitors? The roles of school libraries, classroom libraries, teachers and teacher-librarians in literacy development

Primary school students during the late 1950s learnt to read with John and Betty, Holidays and the Victorian School Readers, with one reader assigned for the entire year. As in many Australian schools of the time, public or private, there was no central school library and the concept of 'wide reading' was probably not even a twinkle in some future educator's eye. Students were fortunate if they had access to books for leisure reading at home, or from the public library, or sometimes in classrooms which might include a cupboard housing a small collection of books for reading in any time which might become available outside of the teaching program ' a classroom library