Session 2: Immersing and appreciating
Introduction
Session 1 introduced you to an appreciative approach to inquiry. It considered its potential for adopting a positive stance in our explorations of experiences and practices that helps us to imagine and enact new ways of being and doing.
This session considers the ways in which immersing ourselves in our environment and appreciating its strengths can help us to bring new ways of seeing to our process of inquiry. This discovery phase involves us recalling, remembering and valuing the positive. Both individually and collectively, we immerse ourselves in an inquiry that explores past and present successes, a process that Marchin (2011) terms ‘affirmative competence’.
Individually and collectively, we ‘immerse’ ourselves in a particular situation or context, exploring all its detail with an appreciative gaze. Central to our discovery is the capacity to see the process as generative and able to act as a catalyst for transformation. Such a process is governed less by neatly contained reflective cycles and more by open-ended reflections, questions and conversations. As you encountered in Session 1, this is what makes appreciative inquiry distinctive:
Rather than establishing and verifying conventional truths about what currently exists, the idea is to interrupt habitual practice by exploring and inspiring innovative alternatives.
In this session, you’ll think more deeply about what this shift in approach might look like in practice. Using an image as a starting point, you will encounter a series of activities that will help to take an appreciative, generative approach to an area of inquiry.
By the end of this session, you should be able to:
- appreciate the value of telling stories in recognising and reframing an area of interest
- use and adapt storytelling activities in an appreciative inquiry context
- identify an aspect of practice that might form the basis for a practitioner inquiry.