4.2 An appreciative gaze
Activity 5 asked you to take time to consider and appreciate the positive, impactful and exciting aspects of your work. You may have found it challenging to think of responses to each question, or you may feel that it came quite easily. Part of developing an appreciative approach is about how we see practices. Critical reflection can often ‘reflect back’ the issues and problems we face, which can create a deficit spiral of feeling there is a list of endless problems to be solved. But, an appreciative approach to inquiry asks us to gaze differently (Ghaye et al., 2008), changing the way we see issues. This can be important where there is already a strong narrative around a particular issue. As Bhaskar states, this is about starting ‘from what is actually happening – not from what appears to be happening or what our initially limited understanding leads us to believe is happening’ (Ghaye et al., 2008, p. 371). It is only by gazing beyond dominant narratives or images about an issue, that we can then begin to understand issues of power, politics and resources that both limit but could also be opportunities for future actions.
Being able to gaze differently, reframing issues in a different way to help ‘see beyond’ current understandings, opens up creative opportunities for inquiry. The case study provides an example of how reframing and reseeing an issue generated different responses.
Case study: A teacher wellbeing during Covid-19
A group of primary and secondary teachers in Scotland met in a workshop to reflect on how Covid-19 had impacted on teacher wellbeing during the pandemic and how they could support their colleagues and themselves going forward. Inevitably, each person came with experiences of the negative impacts that Covid had had on their wellbeing; the uncertainty, the additional workload, the sudden changes in policies and practices. The workshop facilitator, knowing the likely experiences the group would bring, wanted to adopt a more future-looking approach.
While acknowledging the experiences the group had brought, she moved the group to consider the positive practices that had developed as a result of the pandemic. At first, this wasn’t easy. But, through prompting the group to think about strengths that had been developed (people including teachers, non-teaching staff, parents and pupils, the wider community, environment, resources, school building, IT), the group began to articulate a broad range of strengths and opportunities that had already been developed. These included teacher online staffroom events, celebrations of staff achievement and birthdays, walks, timetabled team reflections, recognising skills and talents in the parent community that could help the school and its pupils, and the advantages of online professional learning opportunities as a networking and sharing space.
These ideas, some of which hadn’t been considered in relation to teacher wellbeing before, provided generative and positive openings for the group to think forwards, appreciating what had actually occurred and the opportunities they created.
In the case study, the workshop facilitator had an idea about the dominant narratives that may be brought into the workshop and had an idea about how the issues could be reframed to appreciate the possibilities that had emerged from their experiences. Sometimes it is difficult to reframe an issue. A significant part of this course will be sharing ideas and experiences to support this process.
Armstrong, Holmes and Henning (2020) talk of ‘flipping’ issues to a positive opposite (p. 3). For example:
| Issue | Flip towards the positive |
Lack of engagement with IT package for learning |
Equitable access to learning |
Just by changing the focus from a problem towards the positive, by refocusing our gaze on appreciating a positive and different future, we can see the inquiry in a different way. In doing so, ‘problems’ become creative spaces in which we can generate and act towards a different future based on a solid foundation.
An important part of this solid foundation is a recognition that we inquire not only using our head, through thinking and writing, but with our whole bodies, with emotional and physical reactions which are key to understanding our experiences, as you will explore in the next section.