5 Summary of Session 5

This session of the free course, An appreciative approach to inquiry, has considered the notion of inquiry and scholarship as praxis, where it cannot be contained, boxed up and kept separate from ourselves and our practices, but is instead enmeshed with everything we do, as a stance and a way of living. The implication of this is that evaluating the ongoing messiness of inquiry involves more than reflecting back over a period of time and writing a linear report of what has happened.

This session has instead explored how to map our experiences and reflections as an ongoing process of letting the inquiry unfold in real time, as part of the generative process of thinking ‘what next’ rather than ‘what’s happened’. While we all recognise that there will be a need to sometimes pause and report, whether verbally or in writing, about what we have been doing and thinking, we have explored how telling a good story of our inquiries can help bring other people along with us, either in sharing our vision and working towards it, or by beginning to question some of the accepted practices, images and metaphors that are so common in our educational institutions.

This session has concluded by revisiting what is meant by the term inquiry, understanding how taking an appreciative approach may have challenged some of our initial assumptions, but also developed new ways of thinking and responding to real life scenarios.