Thanks for getting us started Darryl. I have found reading Barbara’s chapter very interesting… Lots of highlighting going on, which is a good sign!
To answer your question about the paradigm shift I think for me it is about understanding what the role of the school librarian is within inquiry. As far as I understand it we are moving from teaching traditional information literacy skills where students are taught to ‘research’ by locating, finding and using information effectively, where the role of the school librarian was to teach using the catalogue, evaluating websites and creating bibliographies etc, to helping the students engage with the process. As Barbara says “inquiry is about developing personal meaning connected to prior knowledge, not accumulating information or adopting someone else’s knowledge”. If we are expecting more of our students we need to offer more too.
I think if we begin to understand what students are going through before and after they get to the investigate stage, our skills to support them in this is part of the paradigm shift.
Why does it matter? Until we as librarians understand this shift we will be unable to support our teachers and students. If we stay in the bubble of information literacy we will always be thought of as teachers of research skills and we know there is more to inquiry than that. We need to be part of the whole picture and be able to explain how and why.
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