FOSIL Group members Darryl Toerien, Lee FitzGerald and Olga Nesi delivered a keynote address at the CILIP School Libraries Group Virtual National Conference 2021 – Shaping Their Futures – which may be downloaded from here.
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Reading and the information-to-knowledge learning process
Balzac declared that the world belonged to him because he understood it. Understanding is not possible without knowledge, and knowledge is constructed from information. Some of our information about the world comes to us directly from experience. However, most of our information about the world, especially in the case of school, comes to us indirectly from what we read in the broadest possible sense of the term (or are told), and this is not limited to informational texts. This learning process of constructing knowledge and understanding from information, which is heavily dependent on reading, presents us with an opportunity – in that, if anything, we know something about reading – and a challenge – in that we need to broaden and deepen our understanding of the integral role of reading, and ourselves, in this learning process.
Following a brief introduction by Darryl Toerien, Head of Library at Oakham School and originator of the FOSIL Group, he will be joined by two of his colleagues from the FOSIL Group, Lee FitzGerald and Olga Nesi.
Lee is Adjunct Lecturer in Teacher Librarianship in the School of Information Studies of the Faculty of Education at Charles Sturt University, and Editor of ACCESS, the Journal of the Australian School Library Association. Lee will talk about arousing curiosity and empathy through fiction in the early stages of the inquiry learning process, as well as the need for intervention deep in the inquiry learning process when reading becomes more detailed and complex, which she will do from the perspective of Guided Inquiry Design (Carol Kuhlthau, Leslie Maniotes and Ann Caspari).
Olga is an award-winning School Librarian in the New York City Department of Education at Edward B. Shallow Junior High School. Olga will talk about questioning the text as it drives, deepens, and personalizes the inquiry experience as well as the teaching strategies, including the use of graphic organisers, that enable students to read deeply and develop new understandings through the inquiry learning process, which she will do from the perspective of the Empire State Information Fluency Continuum (Barbara Stripling).
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