I agree with you, Elizabeth, that we, as librarians, need to offer more than simply teaching traditional research skills.  If we accept the “paradigm” that inquiry is a way of learning, a stance that guides one’s interaction with the world (in school and beyond), then librarians must engage with the whole child, not just the academic or cognitive side.

I have been trying to understand what it means to “engage with the whole child.”  Instinctively, I knew that social and emotional skills were a part of learning, but I have been pursuing my own inquiry into the SEL realm.  I have been investigating the blend of social and emotional skills and attitudes with the cognitive skills of inquiry.  That idea speaks to your point about understanding what students bring to the inquiry – they need to know who they are, what prior knowledge and experiences will inform their new learning, what assumptions and attitudes (feelings) they hold that will affect their interpretation of new information, what interests them about the topic, and so on.  An inquiry stance demands mindfulness, an understanding of everything the learner brings to the table, including past experiences, feelings, knowledge, questions, interests, and passions.

I believe that we can enable our students to become mindful learners by guiding them through a reflective process of inquiry.  Our students need to think about what and how they are learning throughout the process. To guide them, we need to transform our pedagogy to a more constructivist approach that enables students to construct new understandings on their own, applying the skills and strategies that we teach.  For me, then, the paradigm shift for librarians includes both our understanding of what we need to teach, but also how we need to teach.  I think we need to adopt an inquiry stance on librarianship.