ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses socio-spatial perspectives to understand how the distribution and organisation of space may influence everyday practices of reading and contributes to or inhibits the kinds of learning desired. It looks to space to extend the concept of practice by examining how spatialising practice can generate new ways of understanding access and barriers to learning to read within the institutional and physical space of school. By attending to students' actual use and experience of the space of two contrasting school libraries, the chapter makes clear who and what is included and excluded in each library and examines how they are included or excluded. In the case of the school libraries studied in the chapter, the qualitative evaluation of the school libraries was insightful in explaining how both spaces were being perceived and used. The chapter highlights that spatial organisation is dictated by social relations and vice versa.
