1 Inquiry as praxis
This course started by considering what is meant by inquiry, which is used as an encompassing term for practitioner research and scholarship. Session 1 began by challenging notions of inquiry as linear, neat and objective. Instead, taking an appreciative approach to inquiry asks us to start from where we are, embedded and enmeshed in our day-to-day practices, where appreciating the current is seen as something positive to build inquiries from.
Appreciative approaches to inquiry are rooted in the idea of ‘living with’ and ‘living through’ our inquiries, where we constantly become, developing who we are and how we see ourselves, with our projects. This is different to some images and practices of inquiry, research or scholarship where ‘the project’ is perceived to be contained, inside a box, separate and separated from what surrounds it.
Activity 1 Inquiry and you
Reflect on this image of a box (Figure 1), and the notion of inquiry as something contained. Consider how your experiences so far in this course have challenge this image of inquiry. How has inquiry interacted with you and your values, experiences, context, other people and life beyond work? Find an image/metaphor to replace the image of the box and better describe your experiences of inquiry.
You may find that you have returned to metaphors or images you explored in Session 2 of this course, or you may have begun to develop new ones. Whatever the case, your developing sense of what inquiry means to you, including ways of explaining it to others is important. As you may have found yourself, shifting to thinking about an appreciative view of inquiry can take some time, but having images or metaphors to help you tell the story of your relationship with inquiry can help others understand your approach.
The entwining of practice with inquiry with ourselves with our contexts, means that the ‘action’ phase of appreciative inquiry (which, in some traditional research or inquiry, may be presented as ‘contained’), can be considered as a form of praxis.
Praxis is a term not often used in educational contexts, but it has significance for this idea of educational practices as lived inquiry. Smith describes praxis as involving ‘not simply action based on reflection. It is action which embodies … a commitment to human wellbeing and the search for truth, and respect for others. It is the action of people … who are able to act for themselves [and]s is always risky” (Smith 1999/2011). Carr and Kemmis (1986) argue that this requires us to “a wise and prudent practical judgement about how to act in this situation”’(Carr and Kemmis, 1986, p. 190). In this way, praxis is performative, generative, ‘lived’, messy, improvised and ethical, leading us towards theoretical-practical wisdom. In Session 2 we explored the idea of ‘Yes, and’ as a way of acknowledging what is happening and building from it. Zandee (2013) argues, that by improvising and saying ‘yes to the mess’ that we create, we embody and live the inquiry, creating spaces for ‘new insights and competence’ (p.80)
While reading the following vignette, reflect on the ways in which it illustrates inquiry as praxis.
Early Years documentation: inquiry as praxis
A group of Early Years practitioners are inquiring together into how they document children’s learning and share this with parents. Several moments during the inquiry process emerge as significant, where the group deliberately experiment with the opportunities for different practices and thinking that they inspire.
- At an outdoor session to which parents were invited, the children did mud painting, wildlife treasure hunts and participated in a storytelling session around a fire pit. After the event, parents, with their child, were asked to complete a brief evaluation comment about the event. The lead practitioner for each child also added a comment. The differences between these three perspectives about what had happened was sometimes revealing, leading to some practitioners having a conversation with parents and children about the session, and leading to additional information being added to the evaluations. As a result, the inquiry team begin to discuss the role of documentation as a mediating tool in home/nursery/child conversations, which could continue being added to, rather than a ‘capturing’ of evidence.
- One practitioner has his child in a different nursery. As an Instagram user, he began realising just how often he was ‘documenting’ artwork, writing and drawing tasks, physical play, object and environment explorations at home. He decided to share his Instagram with his child’s nursery, who then realised the potential of ‘quick image capture’ to share learning with parents. This ‘quick capture’ of images, shared on an iPad as a presentation at pick up, allowed parents to see what had been going on each session, giving the practitioners, children and parents a shared discussion topic, and modelling activities parents could try themselves at home. In response, some parents and children started creating small photo presentations to share back with the nursery about how they had carried on activities from nursery, at home.
- Each child’s ‘learning folder’ was kept in a cupboard and shared with parents at intervals across the year. One incident challenged assumptions about this practice, when a child, having made a picture story of his favourite teddy having a tea party, asked ‘Can it go in the box’? His key worker got the folder down and then the child asked, ‘What else is in it?’ The child then took time, looking at each page, sometimes remembering events or key moments, and discussing them with his key worker and another friend, stood watching. ‘Why do you keep these?’ came the next question. And then ‘Can I take my story home and not put it here?’ Discussing this event afterwards with her colleagues, assumptions about who owned the folders, what they were for and how decisions were made about what was put in them were all opened up for consideration. As a result, a concept map of ideas emerged as to how to make the folders more meaningful for children and parents.
Having read this description the next activity will help you further explore the notion of inquiry as praxis.
Activity 2 Taking risky, improvisational action
Consider the descriptions of praxis as risky, embodied, experimental, improvisational, messy and active. How do these words relate to the vignette of the Early Years practitioners? In what ways would you argue this was praxis, not just practice?
Now write the terms risky, embodied, experimental, improvisational, messy and active in your journal and note your responses to the following questions:
- a.How do you feel about these descriptions in relation to your inquiry project?
- b.What are the challenges of these statements?
- c.Do you feel ‘free’ to inquire in these ways?
- d.Do you feel able to say, ‘yes to the mess’?
- e.What blocks or hurdles have there been (or do you predict might occur) in taking action in these ways?
Comment
As your inquiry practices develop your relationship with these terms may change. Maybe you feel there are certain spaces or circumstance in which you feel less able to say ‘yes to the mess’ than others. Maybe you become more confident to describe your inquiry using these terms. Or maybe what feels risky or experimental at the start begins to feel more normal.
This ongoing unfolding of practice-inquiry-self as praxis means that inquiry is ongoing, where it can be considered a stance, as we discussed in Session 1. This means that, often, there is no fixed moment in the process where we stop and say, ‘we have finished’, reflecting and evaluating on our experiences and writing a ‘final report’. Yet, reflection, evaluation and sharing our experiences are all key parts of an appreciative approach to inquiry.
The next sections will consider how the roles of re-immersion (as reflection and evaluation) and storytelling (as reporting) are key features of making appreciative approaches to inquiry continually impactful and meaningful to others. They start by considering how to evaluate an inquiry using an appreciative approach.