This is an in-depth study on how a reading promotional project happens, works, and leaves some effects in the community it is implemented.
The article is part of the International Master's Programme in Children's Literature, Media, and Culture, "The Promotion of Reading" Major (Barcelona Pathway). One Book One City (OBOC) in Chiang Mai is kind of a big thing. It is the first time ever in Thailand, that a reading promotional programme is systematically introduced in schools, nurseries and many public spaces across a province. Picture books were made, funded by local people and for the local people to communicate and pass on important local knowledge to their children. And all of this is painstakingly done by a very limited manpower and budget!
I had an honor to get to talk with its project manager, Mrs. Thattaya Anussorn, who kindly guided my through the process of making One Book One City (OBOC) in her province and shared her thoughts on how to re-create its best practices nation-wide.
I really have deep respect for what she has done and hope the knowledge helpful for anyone who is planning to do the similar reading promotional project in their community.
PROJECT NAME
One Book One City (OBOC) by Chiang Mai Aan (CMA-เชียงใหม่อ่าน)
LOCATION
Chiang Mai
CMA’s OBOC projects were held throughout Chiang Mai province during 2018-2020 and in the city area of Chiang Rai province during 2020-2021. Both projects are still on-going. In what follow, I give an overview of the two provinces on the aspects of location, culture, population, and education.
The logo of Chiang Mai Aan
Chiang Mai (เชียงใหม่) is one of the oldest provinces in Thailand (founded in 1296), known as the land of mountains, where the most revered mountain, Doi Suthep, is situated and believed to enshrine the Buddha relics since the 14th century. This mountain’s distinct history and natural resources are used as the topics for the province’s first and second-year OBCE (2018-2020).
The Map of Thailand with Chiang Mai in pink.
Locating in the Northern region with 1,779,254 population (DPA, 2018), Chiang Mai is the country’s second-largest province (20,107.057 square km), consisting of 25 districts. In 2017, its municipality was taken into Creative City Network by UNESCO for its systematic preservation of crafts and folk art (UNESCO, 2020). In 2020, the city was taken into the Global Network of Learning Cities (GNLC), where life-long learning and public participation are promoted for everyone alike to strengthen their knowledge, skills, and vision that help them adapt to future changes (UIL, 2015). The network was established following the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically the fourth goal (“Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”) and the eleventh goal (“Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”) (UN, 2015).
Some pictures of life in Chiang Mai (credit: Unsplash)
In terms of education, Chiang Mai has been in line with Thai educational standards. According to Chiang Mai Provincial Education Office’s (CMPEO) Report for Academic Year 2019, the ration of students (270,029) per teacher (11,690) in Chiang Mai is around 23.1 and the average numbers of students per class for basic education are 20.70 in elementary and 29.33 in secondary school, lower than the latest order from the Ministry of Education (Khaosod, 2018) to reduce the ratio of students per class to 30 in elementary and 40 in secondary school. However, the reading rate of its children still has room to improve. According to The National Statistical Office Thailand (NSOT) (2018a), the reading rate of Chiang Mai’s population above 6 years old (1,609,340 in total) was 76.93%, ranking the 9th out of 16 in its region (the 1st was 87.6%). Although being above the regional average (75%), Chiang Mai’s reading rate was still far behind the central region (80.4%) and the capital city, Bangkok (92.9%) (NSOT, 2018b).
Chiang Rai
The Map of Thailand with Chiang Rai in pink.
Chiang Rai (เชียงราย) situates at the northernmost of Thailand, next to Myanmar and Laos, and enjoys diverse cultures of hill-tribe people living on its surrounded mountain ranges. The province’s cultural diversity and distinct traditions are the topics for its first year OBCE (2020).
The province has 1,292,130 population (DPA, 2018) in 18 districts and covers 11,678.369 square km, making it the second-largest province in the Northern region behind Chiang Mai. In 2019, Chiang Rai municipality was the first province in Thailand to be accepted into the GNLC for its distinct and continuous promotion of public participation and life-long learning.
Some pictures of life in Chiang Rai
(credit: Unsplash, arit.kpru.ac.th, and travel.mthai.com)
In terms of education, Chiang Rai has complied with the nation’s educational standards. According to Chiang Rai Provincial Statistical Report 2020, the ratio of students per teacher in Chiang Rai has increased from 15.34 in 2018 to 16.56 in 2019. The average number of students per class for basic education is 21.52, under the above-said Ministry of Education’s preferable ratio. However, according to NSOT (2018a), its reading rate of the population above 6 years old (1,075,647 in total), although above the regional average (75%), still ranked 13th at 72.05%.
Amongst the young population in the two provinces, early-childhood reading has been neglected the most. Although the provincial reading statistics for children below 6 years old in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai cannot be concluded due to the lack of data, the statistics show that the northern region’s reading rate for 0-6-year-olds was averagely 59.1%, lower than the central region (63.8%), much behind the capital city (76.2%), and below all the other age groups in the northern region, except the elderly people (49.6%) (NSOT, 2018b). These numbers press the necessity for early-year reading promotion policy and projects in the two provinces.
A banner of One Book One City Chiang Rai.
One Book One City (OBOC) is the project that came to fill in the gap. In what follows, I describe the two provinces’ OBOC. The information is from online articles about the projects, Chiang Mai Aan's (CMA) Facebook page posts, CMA’s unpublished executive summary about Chiang Mai’s OBOC in 2020, and my interview on the 4th December 2020 with Mrs. Thattaya Anussorn, CMA’s leader and OBOC’s project manager in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai.
SOCIAL SCOPE
CMA’s OBOCs focused on early-year children and adults in daycares, home, and communal spaces, province-wide (for Chiang Mai) and within the city center (for Chiang Rai). According to Winichakul (2020a), OBOC is conceptually a reading promotion project that works through school and public library systems and more, to get people to read and discuss the same books, which are related to social issues in their communities. The first OBOC project started in 1998 by Nancy Pearl, a librarian in Seattle Public Library, USA, and was later adopted by communities around the world (e.g., Edinburgh, Chicago, Dublin, etc.) including Thailand to reach their own goals, such as building communal unity and promoting literacy.
Nancy Pearl, a librarian in Seattle Public Library, USA, who started the OBOC.
Although the concept of OBOC was firstly adopted in 2013 in Bangkok Metropolitan, Thailand’s capital city, the first successful OBOC application in the country began in late 2018 by CMA, a civil society organization (CSO) in Chiang Mai. Covering the whole Chiang Mai province in late 2018-early 2020, the project was then extended to the municipality of Chiang Rai in the middle of 2020 (Winichakul, 2020b). CMA’s two OBOC projects focused on early-year children’s reading and mainly collaborated with parents and caretakers in governmental daycares to promote children’s reading of the selected picturebooks in all the places they might go, such as at home, in school, libraries, malls, and hospitals, according to the CMA’s executive summary.
The logo of Bangkok Read For Life in 2013,
the reading promotional project in the occassion
that the city was crowned the World Book Capital of that year.
It is still considered a joke for many Bangkokians until now...
From my interview with Mrs. Thattaya Anussorn, as OBOC was intended to promote the reading of the same books and the province-wide discussion of the same topics amongst young children (and people around them), CMA came up with four approaches for the project.
Firstly, the discussion topics of the year were chosen and the publication of picturebooks was commissioned under the topics.
Picture books locally made
to answer the needs of the local (Credit: The Cloud)
Secondly, to spread the reading practices to young children and adults in all areas, CMA held Picturebook Reading Workshops to instruct and inspire caretakers in the governmental daycare system in holding daily early-year reading activities for the OBOC books and other books and communicating with parents to read them for their children. Although Chiang Rai’s OBOC covered only reading promotion in the city area and the workshops were held mainly for city nurseries, some rural daycares were invited to send their representatives to the workshops to learn to replicate them in their areas.
Picturebook Reading in daycares in Chiang Rai.
Thirdly, to engage older children, their teachers, and parents across the province in discussing the OBOC’s topics, CMA created the Handmade Picturebook Competition (ประกวดหนังสือเล่มเล็ก) for Grade 4-9 students, in which their submitted handmade books would be scanned and printed out to display in CMA’s reading tours for early-year children province-wide. In Chiang Mai, CMA held quizzing events in primary and middle schools to inspire students to submit their works. In Chiang Rai, it held a book-making workshop for students to prepare them for the competition.
The poster of the Handmade Picturebook Competition
for Grade 4-9 students in Chiang Mai in 2019.
The students' handmade books.
Fourthly, for city parents/people, who assumingly have time, money, and interest in reading with their children, CMA held the OBOC’s Picturebooks Build Our Town Fair (มหกรรมนิทานสร้างเมือง) in collaboration with other CSOs in the provinces to show how learning activities can be designed based on OBOC’s picturebooks to communicate social agendas with children. The fair aimed to convince the public to see reading as not just a leisure activity but a relevant and crucial social act to improve their lives and their hometown in all aspects. It also aimed to engage all organizations in the province to actively pass on their visions and knowledge to children through reading and learning activities.
Parents and children enjoying reading
at the OBOC’s Picturebooks Build Our Town Fair (มหกรรมนิทานสร้างเมือง)
in Chiang Rai.
ORGANIZERS
PHASE 1: 2019-2020
OBOC projects in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai have been run by a civil society organization, CMA. However, according to Mrs. Thattaya’s interview, the idea to promote reading amongst early-year children was firstly pushed forwards by the state institute, Reading Culture Promotion Project (RCPP- มูลนิธิสร้างเสริมวัฒนธรรมการอ่าน), since 2013.
RCPP is a constituent under the Thai Health Promotion Foundation (THPF), a public organization, founded in 2001 and governmentally supported by 2 percent of annual alcohol and tobacco tax to promote a healthy lifestyle in Thailand (THPF, 2020). Working specifically to promote better early childhood welfare, RCPP funds and collaborates with reading promoters to create reading environments for young children nationwide (RCPP, 2020). To receive governmental funds through RCPP for reading-promotion activities, 11 civil organizations in Chiang Mai founded the CMA association in 2014 (CNX NEWS, 2015).
Mrs. Thattaya stated in the interview that the association’s roles were to distribute the fund to its members and hold meetings for them to share reading-promotion knowledge now and then. Although she admitted that early childhood was not CMA’s focus at that time, the government did support local organizations to collaborate in promoting children’s reading; CMA gained more members every year until 2017 when it reached an MOU with the Chiang Mai government to promote reading as part of the province’s educational reform.
The MOU was supposed to mean that the local government would set up a reading-promotion committee and fund reading activities annually. However, as it did not provide a further plan and a clear role for CMA in the MOU, CMA members broke apart. From 2018 onwards, CMA has been operated by three people, with Mrs. Thattaya as its project manager.
Governmental organizations also played a crucial role in applying OBOC’s concept in Chiang Mai for the first time in early 2018 under the name, Read Doi Suthep (อ่านดอยสุเทพ). Run by THPF’s two constituents, Spark U and RCPP, the project published documentaries and children’s books about Doi Suthep (Tapingkae, 2020), the province’s most revered mountain.
The three children’s books about Doi Suthep
published by Spark U and RCPP in 2018.
From Mrs. Thattaya’s interview, the books’ distribution was aimed to spread knowledge and strengthen Chiang Mai citizens’ love for Doi Suthep. The practice was done in response to a huge corruption case in May 2018, in which the mountain’s forests were cut to build luxurious residence for judges. Three picturebooks, A Journey to Doi Suthep, Our Home: Doi Suthep Forest, Visit Doi Suthep, were published and distributed in the 2nd RCPP’s National Reading Fair in Chiang Mai from the 29th November to 2nd December 2018. The project stopped after the fair.
The shameful and shocking corruption case that inspired the three books.
(Credit: bangkokbiznews)
Seeing the possibility to use the three picturebooks to create wide-spread discussions about local knowledge and environment in Chiang Mai through the topic of Doi Suthep, which is OBOC’s goal (Winichakul, 2020a), CMA continued the project on its own. According to Mrs. Thattaya’s interview, around the end of 2018 until early 2019, CMA fundraised from Chiang Mai citizens through its Hom Heu Doi Fund to publish and distribute the reprints of three picturebooks to 633 governmental daycares (ศูนย์พัฒนาเด็กเล็ก) across the province through Sub-district Municipal Offices (SMO), which governed the daycares.
In February-March 2019, depending on both RCPP and the public fund, CMA ran a Doi Suthep-themed handmade book competition amongst grade 4-9 students to include older students and their adults into the OBOC’s discussions about the mountain (CMA’s poster posted on 30 Jan 2019).
Later in mid-2019, according to Mrs. Thattaya’s interview and CMA’s unpublished executive summary for TK Park, CMA found out that the books SMO distributed did not reach all daycares as planned and the caretakers mostly did not know how to use the books to promote communal unity and local knowledge study. To solve these problems, CMA held 19 half-day picturebook-reading workshops in 19 districts for 847 caretakers from 370 daycares in 23 districts in total (caretakers from 2 districts did not come) every weekend during October-November 2019 within a tight budget of 66,000 THB (1,811 Euros) from RCPP. With the public fund, one of the OBOC’s books, A Journey to Doi Suthep, was reprinted and used in the workshops. Later, another book, Our Home: Doi Suthep Forest, was reprinted to use and distribute in Picturebooks Build Our Town Fair in February 2020 to introduce OBOC to city children, parents and policy influencers.
PHASE 2: 2020-2021
After OBOC’s success in Chiang Mai during 2019-2020, a governmental institute played an important role again as a financial supporter for CMA. In early 2020, Thailand Knowledge Park (TK Park- อุทยานการเรียนรู้) funded CMA to recreate OBOC in Chiang Rai city with the hope to spread the project across the province and all over Thailand in the future (Winichakul, 2020a).
TK Park was a constituent of a public organization, The Office of Knowledge Management and Development (OKMD), under the Office of the Prime Minister. It was founded in 2005 to run a prototype library, where inclusive and diverse learning activities are held daily for all-age users (TK Park, 2010). Apart from spreading know-hows and founding branches across the country, TK Park conducts annual national reading research with NSOT, funds reading promotors, and holds conferences for librarians and book-related professions (ibid). According to Mrs. Thattaya’s interview, unlike RCPP who works as the fund receivers’ mentor and evaluator, TK Park works as CMA’s hirer and sees Chiang Rai people as customers whose evaluation will determine the project’s continuation. This kind of collaboration was said to be preferable for the OBOC project.
OBOC in Chiang Rai city started in June 2020, as part of the province’s life-long learning policy and will end in April 2021 (Winichakul, 2020b). According to Mrs. Thattaya’s interview, with experience from Chiang Mai, CMA systematically planned the project’s key activity for Chiang Rai in each month. It also fixed two main gaps in the previous project by inviting Chiang Rai citizens to select OBOC topics for their province at the beginning of the project and enlarging the OBOC picturebooks’ size to suit reading circle activity in daycares.
To make this all simpler, here is the timeline
of the whole project in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai.
Messy, yes, but they pulled through...
COLLABORATORS
CMA sought collaborations with local communities in various ways. According to its executive summary and Facebook posts, CMA hosted 10 CMA Reading Tours in Chiang Mai’s malls, markets, libraries, international conferences and installed book displays in many public spaces, such as train stations, coffee shops, and hospitals to make OBOC’s social reading concept accessible by all.
Meanwhile, Chiang Rai’s OBOC started with public collaboration as CMA gathered 50 people from state and public sectors, including CSOs in the province, to brainstorm and select the topics Chiang Rai children should read about (Winichakul, 2020b). The meeting decided that Chiang Rai would communicate with children about its cultural diversity and unique traditions (ibid).
14 July 2020 TK Park and CMA hosted a meeting with all the collaborators to discuss the project (Credit: TK Park)
According to Mrs. Thattaya’s interview, the team of ten Chiang Rai citizens was then formed to work with CMA and run OBOC in the following years after CMA moves on to initiate OBOC in other provinces. Six manuscripts were sent from the meeting’s participants; two of them, Malee’s Mountain Trips and Nam Gog Sand, were chosen by professional editors to publish during August-October.
The two manuscripts selected from the local were turned into picture books.
Although Chiang Rai’s OBOC covers only the city area this year (2020), the two books were actively promoted province-wide through the public library system as the Office of the Non-Formal and Informal Education (NFE) in Chiang Rai, which runs public libraries in 18 districts, has joined the meeting and considered itself one of OBOC’s collaborators from the start.
In both provinces, the OBOC’s three main activities, which are the Picturebook Reading Workshops, the Handmade Picturebook Competitions, and Picturebooks Build Our Town Fair, also leaned on locals’ collaboration of two kinds: inside and outside the basic education system.
For the first two activities, CMA utilized the basic education structure in the provinces and worked closely with caretakers in governmental daycares and schools. Despite being initiated by CMA, the picturebook reading workshops were designed to gradually transfer CMA’s responsibilities to caretaker participants through a mentoring system, which is expected to be fully funded by local governments in the future to save CMA’s budget and make OBOC truly belong to local communities. According to Mrs. Thattaya’s interview, Chiang Mai caretakers in 16 districts already held workshops in their areas during November-December 2020. The next step for CMA is to teach them to write reading-project proposals by next year. The organization expects to create 20-30 local reading instructors annually.
For Chiang Rai, the province plans to extend OBOC to all areas and use local offices’ budget to produce a book specifically for each district. The daycares from rural areas were also encouraged to learn to create reading promotion workshops in their communities. In contrast to the workshops that used caretakers to engage early-year children and their parents in OBOC activities, the handmade picturebook competitions used students in older age groups to introduce OBOC to their adults. As all students from grade 4-9 were invited to create handmade books under their province’s OBOC’s topics, the discussions of the same issues were expanded from nurseries to schools. Chiang Rai’s teacher supervisors (ศึกษานิเทศก์) even decided to integrate OBOC’s topics into the school curriculum as part of Chiang Rai Study subject.
Apart from daycare and school systems, OBOC in both provinces find their out-of-school support from both the governmental organizations, which are responsible for local education, and CSOs, who work to improve the environment and the people’s well-being. The Picturebooks Build Our Town Fair in Chiang Mai (2020) was a good showcase for this kind of collaboration. Like the abovesaid workshops, CMA’s book fairs did not aim just to show how reading activities should be done, but also to convince adults to engage children from the youngest age in thinking about what they want their provinces to become. CMA’s executive summary stated that the fair was hosted by 25 Chiang Mai’s organizations, who either funded the fair or ran activities in the fair related to an OBOC picturebook, Our Home:Doi Suthep Forest.
Many local organizations in Chaing Mai co-hosted the OBOC’s Picturebooks Build Our Town Fair (มหกรรมนิทานสร้างเมือง) in 2020.
(Credit: cmcity)
The organizations were from both the governmental sector (e.g., Chiang Mai municipality, Khon-Thai 4.0, Doi Suthep Nature Center, Chiang Mai’s NFE, who runs local libraries, etc.) and private sector (e.g., The Chum Chon Meung Rak Chiang Mai association and Khon Jai Baan, a group of Chiang Mai urban architects, etc.) The fair in Chiang Rai will be held in February 2021 with, according to Mrs. Thattaya’s interview, a similar collaboration to Chiang Mai but different aim to create a life-long learning community, the province’s goal as a member of the UNESCO’s Global Network of Learning Cities (GNLC).
Many activities for children and families in the fair
were co-created and funded by local enterprises.
(Credit: cmcity)
CMA set a goal for OBOC to finally receive funds from each district’s local government as part of the province education policy and fully belong to the citizens. According to Mrs, Thattaya’s interview, Chiang Mai’s OBOC has already depended on governmental, public funds, and the sales of its books. Chiang Rai’s OBOC was also planned to similarly monetize its books’ copyrights and publication to create more books for the province and run sustainably. Using Chiang Rai citizens’ fund to sustain the project, OBOC is hoped to tie its bond with the public and inspire people to develop the project continuously.
OUTSTANDING ACTIONS
According to the interview with Mrs. Thattaya Anussorn, the implementation of caretaker workshops was OBOC’s turning point, in which CMA was struck with the realization that social reading could not happen without active mediators, who ran meaningful reading activities for children regularly. As cultural relevancy in literature can inspire children to read and enhance their literacy (Tatum, 2000), reading mediators must be aware of these benefits of the cultural-related corpus and know how to make use of them.
To communicate with local mediators the importance of social reading, small, intimate workshops might be a key. Like the successful Books Like Me project in Indiana, USA, in which an intimate communal event was held for 20 community members (Zygmunt et al, 2015), CMA also held 19 small workshops (30-40-participant) for all the caretakers in Chiang Mai with the main purpose to make them aware of the importance of culturally relevant reading for children.
Small workshops allowed participants to feel the books relatable and be inspired to share their experiences of living in the communities (Zygmunt et al, 2015). Likewise, according to Mrs. Thattaya’s interview, the caretaker participants felt confident to read to children and were highly motivated to create activities around OBOC’s books as they already knew the stories very well. They created groups in Line application to discuss activities later on and proudly exchange the results from their classrooms.
The workshops were not only designed to promote cultural-relevant reading but also answer each province’s different needs. According to Mrs. Thattaya’s interview, the workshops in Chiang Mai were divided into three topics to “fix the weakness of the three picturebooks”, which were not produced out of public participation from the start and, thus, lack understanding of people’s needs and actual usages of books (55:55-57:38).
As caretakers found some parts of OBOC books’ illustrations and content (especially Visit Doi Suthep) too complex to explain to children, the workshop’s first session taught them basic picturebook analytic methods. The second session suggested read-aloud techniques and further activities to inspire children to learn about their communities. Since the published OBOC books were too small to engage children in the furthest row, the third session of the workshop taught caretakers to create pop-ups from normal books to draw every child’s attention in reading circles. Contrarily, as Chiang Rai’s OBOC topics were publicly recognized and the books’ size was fixed from the beginning, its workshops focused instead on letting caretakers and the books’ creators discuss and create the diverse learning activities out of the books
METHODOLOGY
Although Mrs. Thattaya stated in the interview that the model of CMA’s OBOC will be improved every year and differently customized to each province’s needs, I found that the projects’ patterns can be divided into 8 similar steps which Winichakul (2020a), the director of TK Park, had concluded from OBOC projects elsewhere in the world.
The methods are as follows:
1. Identify what the community wants (e.g., Chiang Mai wanted to improve its city plan and public welfare while Chiang Rai wanted to establish a life-long learning community).
2. Form the working team.
3. Determine the budget and time for the project.
4. Identify the collaborators (e.g., governmental sector, CSOs, caretakers, teachers, parents, etc.) and their roles and include them in the project.
5. Agree on the reading topics that the community will promote within a year (i.e., Read Doi Suthep for Chiang Mai; diverse culture and local traditions for Chiang Rai).
6. Create books that discuss the chosen topics. From Chiang Rai’s OBOC, the process is expected to last at least 3 months (August-October).
7. Develop activities to promote discussions about the books (e.g., picturebook reading workshops, handmade book competitions, book fairs, and book tours).
8. Promote the books and make the public realize the benefits of communal-relevant reading. For example, CMA’s workshops and book fairs inspired caretakers and CSOs to actively mobilize and sustain OBOC by emphasizing that OBOC was run by the citizens’ money and encouraged everyone to use the picturebooks to pass on the love and visions for the community to the next generations.
Children enjoyed learning about their province
at the OBOC’s Picturebooks Build Our Town Fair (มหกรรมนิทานสร้างเมือง)
in Chiang Mai in 2020 (Credit: cmcity).
PERSONAL ACCESSMENT OF THE INFORMANT
According to Winichakul (2020a), although OBOC is not a shiny new concept, CMA’s OBOCs are unique as they focus on creating books and discussions around the chosen topics instead of the existing literature like previous OBOC elsewhere. Their production and promotion of communal-relevant literature can yield many cultural and educational benefits.
Several studies show that children acquire literacy while learning about their culture and social histories (Goldenberg, 1987; Reese & Gallimore, 2000; Reese, Goldenberg, Loucky, & Gallimore, 1995), while their representations in media can assure their self-worth (Au, 2001), help them make sense of the world, find their place in society, and want to read more (Bishop; 1990; Feger, 2006). To read comprehensively and critically, children also need sufficient background knowledge (Strangman et al, 2004), and culturally relevant text and pedagogy (Tatum, 2000). Thus, by discussing the child readers’ communities, OBOC’s books help confirm the children’s identities and boost their language skills, social knowledge, and love for reading.
According to CMA’s unpublished executive note (2020), Chiang Mai caretakers reported that children repeatedly requested OBOC’s picturebooks for reading circles and read the books by themselves. They also remembered and retold the stories to their friends and parents. However, the effects of CMA’s OBOC projects should be systematically investigated in further studies to confirm their results.
KEY TAKE AWAYS
The projects’ design that engages public participation and makes OBOC belong to its community is also an interesting take-away for future reading projects. In contrast to Bangkok OBOC’s failure in 2013, its participatory elements may be the key to create a sustainable reading society in a place where reading has not yet been culturally ingrained like Thailand.
In her interview, Mrs. Thattaya suggested that Thailand could and should not entirely follow the patterns of reading promotion projects from countries where reading culture was already firmly established. Instead, it should start small by patiently convincing the public that reading can serve their life and working goals as well as improve their daily life.
Comparative research of reading promotion in countries with similar reading culture as Thailand should be made to see what and what not make a successful and sustainable project. Meanwhile, longitudinal research could be conducted to ensure the success factors of CMA’s OBOC.
Reference
Primary Text
Anussorn, T. (2018) หนูน้อยไปดอยสุเทพ (A Journey to Doi Suthep). Reading Culture Promotion. Samutsakorn: Plan Printing. Available from: https://issuu.com/75202/docs/____________________2018 (Last accessed: 1 January 2021)
Bhaddhanavech. R. (2018) กราบดอยสุเทพ (Visit Doi Suthep). Reading Culture Promotion. Samutsakorn: Plan Printing. Available from: https://issuu.com/75202/docs/54229_1542550024970_________________1f31ca4c008e0c (Last accessed: 1 January 2021)
Phupuket, N. (2020) มาลีแอ่วดอย (Malee’s Mountain Trips). Thailand Knowledge Park. Chiang Mai: Wanida Karnpim Available from: https://www.tkpark.or.th/stocks/library_book/o0x0/00/60/0060c1/MaleeBook.pdf (Last accessed: 1 January 2021)
Potjawan, P. (2020) ทรายนํ้ากก (Nam Gog Sand). Thailand Knowledge Park. Chiang Mai: Wanida Karnpim. Available from: https://www.tkpark.or.th/stocks/library_book/o0x0/00/5f/005f33/sainamkok.pdf (Last accessed: 1 January 2021)
Tapingkae, W. (2018) ป่าดอยบ้านของเรา (Our Home, Doi Suthep Forest). Reading Culture Promotion. Samutsakorn: Plan Printing. Available from: https://issuu.com/75202/docs/54229_1542550024970________________ (Last accessed: 1 January 2021)
Secondary Text
Thai references
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Chiang Rai Provincial Statistical Office (2020). รายงานสถิติจังหวัดเชียงราย Chiang Rai Provincial Statistical Report. [Online] Available from:https://drive.google.com/file/d/149mFIC8HIq4RodR3xKIZ6ShUmAvC1gkj/view (Last accessed: 30 December 2020)
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