Concepts of Reading, the Act of Reading and the Reader. A Meeting with Avid Readers

Abstract

The paper stems from the need to reflect on the concepts of reading, the act of reading and the reader. The goal is to understand that the practice of reading is a set of deliberate, sedate, disciplined acts that evoke and allow the building, in the reader’s mind, of plots, endings, character images, glimpses of the human condition in literature, history, philosophy, or simply in academic readings that shape the reader into a lover of words. We start with William Ospina, Estanislao Zuleta, Jesús Martín Barbero, Roger Chartier; moving through educators Paulo Freire, Emilia Ferreiro, Judith Kalman and Fernando Vásquez; and classical references John Locke, Friedrich Nietzsche, Werner Jaeger. The article builds the result of a literature exploration on the subject of reading in the context of Research Project “Civic education about cultural policies” by La Salle University.