Appreciative Inquiry: Using Personal Narratives for Initiating School Reform

Abstract

n January 1993, the authors of this article, all instructors at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, began an ethnographic study of school cultures in three urban Catholic high schools. The project was inspired largely by the research of Bryk, Lee, and Holland (1993) who, in Catholic Schools and the Common Good, observed that specific components of the Catholic high school curricula, community, and administration have been especially effective in educating students from minority and disadvantaged backgrounds. We selected three Catholic high schools in Philadelphia-the coeducational Cardinal Dougherty High School, Little Flower Catholic High School for Girls, and Northeast Catholic High School for Boys-that have had marked success in addressing the needs of minority and disadvantaged students. We then sought to identify aspects of each school's culture that contributed to its effectiveness, especially focusing on those elements identified as potentially important in the research by Bryk, Lee, and Holland (1993). In approaching each school culture, we used (AI)-an ethnographic method that uses interviews with various members of the school community, including staff, students, administrators, parents, and alumni. Because the appreciative inquiry process is not a research method designed specifically to compare and contrast results from different schools, we report here on the application of the process within just one school, Cardinal Dougherty High School. We focus on Cardinal Dougherty because, among the three schools studied, it best represents the typical urban high school: it has a largely unionized faculty (39 lay faculty-23 men and 16 women) in addition to 12 nonunion religious, and it has a growing, coeducational