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

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

Episode 32 of FOSIL, Education and School Libraries (recorded on Saturday 19 August 2026) is now available: Reading Is Inquiry: Helping Students Make Sense of Their World.

We were again joined by Gabrielle Mace for this special and final episode in this series.

Gabrielle is a literacy consultant, former Head of Library Services and Teacher Librarian, whose work focuses on reading culture, inquiry and the role of school libraries in developing engaged, thoughtful readers and learners. She has worked with inquiry throughout her career and is currently exploring the intersection between deep reading, inquiry and student engagement in her practice.

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Gabrielle’s question that we explored answers to in this episode was:

7. Reading as inquiry conversation | Yours and Barbara’s concept of inquiry as conversation has made me think differently about reading. I’ve been observing what happens when students need to read because they genuinely need the information to resolve uncertainty, including voluntarily returning to something they’ve already read because new evidence has changed its possible meaning. | Do you see reading itself as an inquiry conversation, and are reading and inquiry more deeply connected than we sometimes acknowledge in schools?

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My preparatory notes follow below.

Yes.

Revisit Jacques Maritain from previous Episode

“Nothing is more important than the events which occur within that invisible universe which is the mind of [a person]. And the light of that universe is knowledge. If we are concerned with the future of civilization we must be concerned primarily with a genuine understanding of what knowledge is, its value, its degrees, and how it can foster the inner unity of the human being.”

Not just information—”inert ideas”, as Whitehead (1929) puts it—so what is knowledge and how do we get it? Again Whitehead—the joy of discovering that ideas can help students make sense of the stream of events that pours into their lives, is their lives, which is reality.

Paulo Freire: Paulo Freire’s The importance of the act of reading (1983), in which he observes that

“reading the world precedes reading the word, and the subsequent reading of the word cannot dispense with continually reading the world” (p. 5).

Now, as Norman Beswick (1967) noted

“some knowledge [of the world/ reality], truly, comes from experience and experiment [reading the world]; most knowledge from record [reading the word], in the widest McLuhan-like sense” (p. 201).

This is vitally important, because it broadens our understanding of what it means to read, and, indeed, what can be read. And, in case it is not obvious, this is inquiry—coming to know and understand reality through learning to accurately and dynamically read the world (experience and experiment) and the word (record).

Simone Weil: Developing attention—making yourself fully available—is of utmost importance. Attention cannot be forced, but can be captured by words that are worthy of attention, words that are revelatory.

I have been giving much thought to reading [and writing—still to come] throughout the inquiry process:

• Connect | Reading to engage with the text intellectually and emotionally
• Wonder | Reading to enter into dialogue with the text
• Investigate | Reading to make sense of/ know the text (what is the text saying to me?)
• Construct | Reading to find meaning in/ understand the text (what does the text mean to me?)
• Express | Reading to communicate personal knowledge and understanding
• Reflect | Reading to reflect on learning

Moreover, inquiry is communal/ conversational—elsewhere (1970/2005), Freire writes that

“apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human, [because] knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (p. 72).

Now school, in my experience, does not view inquiry in relation to reading in this way, or at least not coherently and consistently.