Reply To: Defining “Research” and “Advanced” and “Inquiry”

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

Hello, and thank you, Alyssa—and Elizabeth.

Jenny and I are in the final week of our academic year, so will only be able to reply more fully here and elsewhere next week.

However, some immediate thoughts here…

It was/ is necessary, and therefore helpful, to make a distinction between inquiry and research (and information literacy for that matter), which many colleagues, including librarians, conflate, and which is one of the tendencies that saps inquiry of its potency.

Ideal libraries: A guide for schools (2018/2022, p. 9)—citing Callison (2015) and Levitov (2016)—made the point clearly that “inquiry is more expansive than research, and facilitating it requires expertise beyond research methods.”

By then, the shift in school libraries from research process models to inquiry process models had been underway for more than a decade, with Barbara’s model of the inquiry process, which was one of the earliest, being published in 2003. For reasons that I do not fully understand yet, explorations of inquiry as “a method of instruction and an environment for formalized learning” (Shera, 1972, p. 177) had been underway outside of school libraries for far longer. Two examples that I am familiar with are:

• The Developing Inquiring Communities in Education Project (DICEP), which started in 1991 as a collaboration between teachers in public schools (Grades 1–8) in metro Toronto and surrounding areas and university teacher educators at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto. However, over its 10 years, the Project saw a shift in focus from “a study of ‘Learning through Talk’ in elementary science classrooms [to] creating opportunities for inquiry-based learning and teaching at all levels and in all areas of the curriculum” (p. 2).
• Even earlier, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner devoted a chapter to The Inquiry Method in Teaching as a subversive activity (1969), and even then they noted that “of all the ‘survival strategies’ education has to offer, none is more potent or in greater need of explication than the ‘inquiry environment’” (p. 36, emphasis added).

In 2017, Barbara wrote that “the teaching of inquiry skills [within a learning process aimed the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge and understanding] represents a paradigm shift for school librarians [and classroom teachers]” (2017, p. 53), and this paradigm shift is still, frustratingly, underway, as is the need for explication.

I’ll share more on this important topic in due course.

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References

• Callison, D. (2015). The evolution of inquiry: controlled, guided, modeled, and free. Libraries Unlimited.
• IBO. (2018). Ideal libraries: A guide for schools. International Baccalaureate Organisation (UK) Ltd.
• Levitov, D. (2016). School libraries, librarians, and inquiry learning. Teacher librarian, 28-35.
• Postman, N., & Weingartner, C. (1969). Teaching as a subversive activity. Delacorte Press.
• Shera, J. (1972). Foundations of education for librarianship. Wiley-Becker and Hayes.
• Stripling, B. K. (2003). Inquiry-based learning. In B. K. Stripling & S. Hughes-Hassell (Eds.), Curriculum connections through the library (pp. 3–39). Libraries Unlimited.
• Stripling, B. K. (2017). Empowering students to inquire in a digital environment. In S. W. Alman (Ed.), School librarianship: past, present, and future (pp. 51–63). Rowman & Littlefield.
• Wells, G. (2001). The case for dialogic inquiry. In G. Wells (Ed.), Action, talk & text: Learning and teaching through inquiry (pp. 171–194). Teachers College Press.