Reply To: Discussing Education, Libraries and FOSIL With Elizabeth Hutchinson

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

Episode 29 of FOSIL, Education and School Libraries (recorded on Sunday 2 August 2026) is now available: Inquiry as Conversation: FOSIL, School Libraries and the Future of Learning.

Barbara Stripling joined us for this special episode, and I asked her the following question to get us going:

• Inquiry as conversation
  • There was a shift from a resource-centred view of the library in 1970s to a student-centred view in the 1980s
  • Brainstorms and blueprints: Teaching library research as a thinking process (1988) was the result of a conversation between you and your colleague and friend, Judy Pitts
  • Curriculum connections through the library (2003) marked the shift from a research process to an inquiry process for you, in which you introduced your model of the inquiry process
  • Your model then became integral to the New York City Information Fluency Continuum (NYCIFC, 2009)
  •  The NYCIFC was then endorsed by New York State and became the Empire State Information Fluency Continuum (ESIFC, 2012)
  • The ESIFC was then re-imagined (2019)
  • Now, the re-imagined ESIFC is scheduled to be re-imagined again (2026/7)
  • Why is this conversation, which stared more than 50 years ago for you, still worth having?

Priorities for me going forward are:

• Paulo Freire’s notion that inquiry–coming to know and understand reality–is a dynamic interplay between reading the world [through experience] and the word [through the record of experience, both our own and those of others].
• Something vitally important happens between making sense of information about the world–Investigate–and finding meaning in that information–Construct–which is worthy of greater attention.
• Dallas Willard’s four main factors involved in the realm of thought–ideas, images, information and thinking–will be helpful, here, both in terms of designing and supporting inquiry, but also clarifying the role of the library/ian in this.
• Barb and I devoted quite some time to discussion the role of deep reading in the inquiry process, and there is scope for doing so for writing, especially in terms of writing to make sense of and find meaning in.
• More broadly, then, to make a case for a liberal education with inquiry as distinguishing feature.