# 3 Starting points for inquiry

In this section, you will turn your attention to your own context and practice, identifying a focus for inquiry and applying some of the techniques you have already learned to help you consider this through an appreciative inquiry lens.

You might choose to complete the activities that follow on your own, or you may be working with others on a more collaborative inquiry. Equally, the timeframe in which you complete them will depend on the scale and timeline of your inquiry, from a few hours to perhaps even several weeks. Remember, the aim is to immerse yourself in a context and begin to view it with an appreciative gaze. As you work through the activities, immersing yourself in your context, you will move from a broad to a more clearly defined focus for your inquiry.

At this stage, you may have a focus for your inquiry, and you may have started from a problem-solving stance. Alternatively, you may not yet have a focus for your inquiry but want to use the appreciative approach to develop some ideas about what could become the focus. The following activities are aimed to differentiate between these two scenarios, allowing you to select activities that are most appropriate for the stage you are at.

Figure 7 Positive scrabble letters

First, it is important to start with a positive focus for your inquiry. If the purpose is expansive, such as strategic planning at institutional level, the inquiry focus needs to be suitably expansive; you may begin by telling stories about ‘the institution at its best’ (Cockell and McArthur Blair, 2020). Alternatively, there may be a tighter focus because the area of interest is narrower, whereby you may begin by telling stories about specific incidents, events, examples of practices at their best or most exciting. Either way, the key at this point is to frame the focus of the inquiry positively. If you are just beginning to identify a focus then complete Activity 5. Note: If you already have an inquiry focus, you might choose to move straight to Activity 6.

## Activity 5 Beginning to identify a focus for an appreciative inquiry

Time for this activity is open-ended

This activity may take you a while to complete as you begin to consider what aspect(s) of your practice you want to focus on. If you are working collaboratively, you may need to complete this activity over a series of sessions, working both individually and then sharing your stories to collectively identify aspects you feel are worthy of becoming your focus. The activity below outlines this process, but you will need to adapt it to your circumstances.

Individually – spend time over the course of a day/week/month, writing short stories about aspects of practices that excite, energise or intrigue you. Also add in moments where you felt pride, appreciation for something going well, someone doing something interesting, and moments where you felt a sense of satisfaction. You may complete this as a series of free writing sessions, or you may decide to capture it in other ways (e.g. photographs, concept maps, notes).

Individually and/or collectively – bring your stories together into one place. Look across the stories for commonalities. What links the moments of positive emotions? What links the moments of pride, satisfaction? What exciting, energising or intriguing practices hold possibilities for further exploration?

### Discussion

This is the beginning of identifying a ‘positive core’ for your inquiry. At this point, you don’t need to ‘fix’ it as a definite focus, just have some ideas you can move through the rest of the sessions, refining and developing your focus as you go.

If you have come to this session with an already formed focus, you may need to reframe your inquiry towards an appreciative stance. Below are a set of three examples of how this can be done.

Review the two examples below on the process of reframing, and provide your response in the boxes provided.

## Example 1

A question we often hear about students participating in online tutorials is, ‘Why are students so reluctant to turn on their microphones or cameras to engage in the tutorial?’

How might you adapt this question to give it a positive focus?

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### Answer

Reframing this question with a positive focus might read something like:

What are the best examples of student engagement in online tutorials?

This re-worked question makes two important shifts. First, its use of the phrase ‘best examples’ helps to shift the focus from a negative view of students to something more positive – a context in which they do engage. Second, the phrase ‘student engagement’ and the absence of the reference to microphone use begins to suggest that there are other ways of engaging students that are worth exploring.

## Example 2

Research has shown that a significant proportion of children’s reading outside of school does not involve reading books. For example, in 2011, text messages, magazines, websites and emails were found to be the most popular choices (Clark and Douglas, 2011, cited in Cremin et al., 2014, p. 11). How can we solve this problem?

How might this issue be framed more positively?

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### Answer

Reframing this question with a positive focus might read something like:

How can we capitalise on children’s reading choices to enhance their reading skills and their enjoyment of texts?

This shift reflects other research suggesting that children are aware that they can ‘gain different reading satisfactions from different types of text … since different forms of reading such as magazines, computer games, online material and fiction feed off one another’ (Cremin et al., 2014). So, an appreciative inquiry relating to children’s reading practices might focus on what children do read rather than what they do not.

## Example 3

Last year, in your faculty, 11% of students withdrew from their studies before the end of the first term. How do we solve this problem?

What might this question look like given a positive focus?

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### Answer

Reframing this question with a positive focus might read something like:

What can we learn about the factors that influence 89% of our students to complete their studies that will help us to increase retention still further?

While 11% of students withdrew, this means that 89% did not. Therefore, one way of positively reframing this issue might be to focus your inquiry on the factors that influence the retention of 89% rather than the withdrawal of 11%.

In the next activity you will apply the same process of reframing to your own inquiry focus.

## Activity 6 Positively reframing a problem-focused inquiry

Allow about 10 minutes

Now consider the area of your own context or practice that you want to use as a focus of inquiry. How will you positively reframe this? Write down three positive statements that could become the core of your inquiry.

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### Discussion

Now that you have a positive focus for your inquiry, the next step is to become immersed in this focus, bringing an ‘appreciative gaze’ and beginning to generate stories, images and metaphors that act as a springboard to new ways of seeing.

Now that you have reframed the focus of your inquiry, the next section will help you to work with this positive core to generate new ways of thinking.

OpenLearn - An appreciative approach to inquiry
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