Appreciative Stance Research Articles

Leadership learning design principles: Co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts

The purpose of this paper is to share our pedagogical evolution as graduate faculty in relationship with increasingly diverse cohort communities of early childhood professionals learning across the landscape of leadership roles engaged with young children, families, and other adults. The early childhood leadership program described in this paper offers a graduate certificate where annually, a cohort of 18-22 early childhood professionals from across Colorado in the United States learn together for 13 months. As faculty, we share a strong commitment to both learning about our teaching and to inviting student voices, the early childhood professionals, through dialogic processes in participatory study as we co-learn and grow our practices of learning and teaching. This paper introduces and explores four leadership learning design principles: (1) identity and agency, (2) socially constructed pedagogy, (3) contextually relevant learning experience, and (4) appreciative stance. As we go, the story will unfold around how we engaged cohort members of the 2019-2020 program year through initial survey reflections and then deepening our shared understanding of these leadership learning design principles through iterations of dialogue after the program was concluded. We end the paper with reflections on how this process of study has ultimately brought us to an awareness and eagerness to engage in relational forms of inquiry, placing student voices at the center with even more intention and depth.

“Research Is Not Innocent”: A Review of Thalia Mulvihill and Raji Swaminathan’s Collaborative Qualitative Research

Mulvihill and Swaminathan have written a wide-ranging book that takes a close look at how qualitative research can be collaborative and what implications come from how collaborative practices are taken up. While taking an appreciative stance toward collaborative research practices, they do not shy away from the challenges and unrealized potentials that are involved. This book serves as both an introduction to the basics of collaborative qualitative research and an in-depth look at the issues for the more experienced collaborative researcher.

Reasoning Processes Involved in Reading and Responding to Students’ Writing

ABSTRACT This paper explores the reasoning processes expert teachers use when reading and responding to elementary students’ writing. We report findings from a qualitative multi-case study drawing on “think-aloud” interview data from seventeen participants as they read and responded to narrative, informational, and opinion/argumentative drafts. Findings indicate the teachers looked for the logic in student drafts, compared the drafts to an internalized “expected text,” responded to meaning before mechanics, framed their responses within an iterative process, and prioritized what they chose to respond to. The findings suggest three aspects of teacher reasoning that extend the current literature on effective reading and responding: (1) an appreciative stance grounded in a view of children as authors; (2) comparison to complex multi-faceted expected texts; and (3) reasoning in terms of iterative response cycles. By unpacking expert teacher reasoning, this study provides insight into what novice teachers must learn in order to formulate effective responses and points to the importance of future research into how to support this learning.

Existential Conservatism

AbstractThis essay articulates a kind of conservatism that it argues is the most fundamental and important kind of conservatism, viz. existential conservatism, which involves an affirmative and appreciative stance towards the given world. While this form of conservatism can be connected to political conservatism, as seen with Roger Scruton, it need not be, as seen with G. A. Cohen. It is argued that existential conservatism should be embraced whether or not one embraces political conservatism, though it is also shown that existential conservatism imposes constraints on our political thinking. In particular, it is argued that Cohen's ‘luck egalitarianism’ stands at odds with his existential conservatism and that one should be a sufficientarian rather than an egalitarian with regard to economic justice.

Individual Cognitive Effort and Cognitive Transition During Organization Development

How do personal mind-sets change during an organization development intervention and how are these transitions associated with the intervention characteristics? In a qualitative theory-driven case study based in South Africa, the transitions of six individuals during an appreciative inquiry were scrutinized longitudinally for first-order and second-order changes. Five individuals showed first-order changes and two showed second-order changes. The engaging and emergent characteristic of the intervention explained the majority of these cognitive transitions. A third type of change in mind-set emerged in four of the cases: the development of an appreciative stance, which we classify as a form of cognitive effort rather than a cognitive transition. We conclude that interventions focusing on positivity may lead to participants developing an appreciative stance, but successful organization development might not occur without sufficient engagement in an emergent process. We provide some guidelines for practitioners for conducting an engaging emergent change process.

Indigenous Communities and Community-Engaged Research: Opportunities and Challenges

As the inaugural issue of The Engaged Scholar Journal made apparent, while there is significant evidence that community-engaged scholarship has reached a critical mass in Canadian institutions, many important junctures still need to be explored. One such issue is the recognition of Indigenous community-engaged scholarship. Working from an appreciative stance, the three authors of this article explore how existing community-engaged scholarship theory intersects with their own experiences as academics—teasing out some of the potentialities and tensions that exist in the lived spaces where community-engagement thrives, amidst the boundaries of institutional tenure and promotion policies. The article also explores what kinds of practices or policies might be usefully considered by institutions, particularly around how to engage in more inclusive processes of scholarly recognition. We argue it is possible to embrace tools that create reciprocal, respectful and meaningful relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples who share deeply held beliefs in the power of research to alter lives and communities in powerful ways.

Transforming Practice in Developmental Disability Services Through Systemic and Dialogical Practice

The aim of this article is to tell a story of organizational change in a large government developmental disability service responsible for working with multistressed families. Over a 10-year period, case management and clinical methods were significantly enhanced, to include systemic and dialogical practices. Many disempowered and stressed staff members were able to develop leadership roles, some seeding local teams or learning to work with families differently. Factors that allowed for this change included conducting research to establish the trustworthiness of innovation, a focus on emergent and local change rather than an establishment in organizational policy frameworks, an appreciative stance toward staff and families, and the circulation of healing stories from systemic interviews to senior management. In the end, after 10 years work, six systemic consultation teams were developed and a further four family support clinics. Initially these teams were based on post-Milan systemic family therapy but la...

Authenticity and Accountability: Key to an Appreciative Stance to Adaptable Leadership

Authenticity and Accountability: Key to an Appreciative Stance to Adaptable Leadership

Doing ‘strengths-based’ research: Appreciative Inquiry in a probation setting

This article considers the application of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) as a research methodology in the field of probation research. Although AI has previously been used in prisons research it has not to date been applied to research on probation. In this article we describe why and how AI was applied in an exploratory study of ‘quality’ in probation practice. The article includes some reflections from us as researchers and from the participants in our study (staff in three English Probation Trusts). It is argued not only that AI served our project well (in terms of furnishing us with a wealth of relevant, good quality data) but also that our choice of methodology rendered visible aspects of contemporary probation culture which, we believe, would have remained hidden had we not chosen to explore quality through an ‘appreciative’ lens. It is further argued that in organizations experiencing challenging times, an appreciative stance has ethical as well as instrumental advantages. There are, thus, both instrumental and normative rationales for recommending AI as a suitable approach in probation research.

Asceticism and Anthropology in Irenaeus and Clement (review)

Correctly noting that any discussion of asceticism must be based on the foundational question of human identity, John Behr presents a fascinating examination of the theological anthropology of Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130-200) and Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215). Asceticism and Anthropology in Irenaeusand Clement is a well-defined study of two early Christian writers who, despite being near-contemporaries confronting various "Gnostic" groups as common opponents, came to very different conclusions about human identity and Christian living. Significantly, Irenaeus and Clement present a large body of extant texts from a period in Christianity prior to the rise of monasticism. "For them," Behr states, "asceticism was not a detachable dimension of Christian life. . . . Rather, asceticism was the realization, the putting into practice, of the new eschatological life granted in baptism within the confines of the present life" (17). With a critical yet appreciative stance toward the work of scholars such as Michel Foucault and Peter Brown, Behr addresses the need for contemporary scholarship to pursue "a history of Christian asceticism written from the theological perspective of the writers under study" (15).

Unitary appreciative inquiry.

Unitary appreciative inquiry is described as an orientation, process, and approach for illuminating the wholeness, uniqueness, and essence that are the pattern of human life. It was designed to bring the concepts, assumptions, and perspectives of the science of unitary human beings into reality as a mode of inquiry. Unitary appreciative inquiry provides a way of giving fullest attention to important facets of human life that often are not fully accounted for in current methods that have a heavier emphasis on diagnostic representations. The participatory, synoptic, and transformative qualities of the unitary appreciative process are explicated. The critical dimensions of nursing knowledge development expressed in dialectics of the general and the particular, action and theory, stories and numbers, sense and soul, aesthetics and empirics, and interpretation and emancipation are considered in the context of the unitary appreciative stance. Issues of legitimacy of knowledge and credibility of research are posed and examined in the context of four quality standards that are deemed important to evaluate the worthiness of unitary appreciative inquiry for the advancement of nursing science and practice.

The dangers of writing up: a cautionary tale from Bangladesh

In this paper, we reflect on our experiences of writing up for an 'action research' project in Bangladesh. In this work we wanted both to produce high quality anthropological analysis, and also to meet development aims, which depended on effective partnerships with those we were studying. In writing up we found that these aims can be conflicting. Our experience highlights the need for applied anthropologists to be acutely aware of their role and status and to be prepared for the kind of reaction their text may provoke. Some practical lessons include a recommendation to keep the text a 'work in progress' for as long as possible, using this time to share and revise it with others and to build consensus before publication. We also found it useful to move from a critical to an appreciative stance in our analysis. We believe that this change of focus does not lessen the rigour of analysis but presents information in a more constructive way which is conducive to partnerships and action.