Appreciative inquiry: A strengths-based perspective for identifying and creating positive change in the design and enactment of physical and sport education
Critical theorising over the past thirty years presents an argument that the program design and pedagogical enactment of physical education makes little educational impact or influence on the lives of many if not most students. A deficit physical education narrative is created by the crisis and critical research for the teaching profession. At the AIESEP conference in 2016 I asked the question, ‘How might the PE and sport educational discourse develop if instead of beginning with a problem, the research adopted an appreciative perspective to consider first, what might be good?’ as an alternative to the reliance on perspectives and the 'labelling' of physical education that has resulted.
I am not suggesting Appreciative Inquiry (AI) replace critical inquiry, or that the issues raised by critical inquiry are not worthy - not at all: but I propose greater use of AI occur as it askes different questions of the field to critical inquiry. Rather than focusing on how 'the world' of physical education 'is not', I suggest that AI can balance this deficit labelling by research of physical education by first asking, 'what is working’? and then asking 'how do we amplify that?'
Problem-solving is a popular perspective in physical education scholarship (Fiorentino, 2012). Enright et al. (2014) stated physical education “scholars have certainly worked hard to identify and understand what is broken” as well as idealising superior performance as problem solving and perhaps many share a “preoccupation with failure and a problem-focussed orientation towards educational change” (p. 914). Giles and Anderson (2008) suggested that a consequence of the popular theoretical framework of critical inquiry through the popular methodology of action research for educational discourse is that the discourse becomes immersed in only problem and deficit based narratives. In comparison, the data collection for AI focusses on information about organisations ‘at their best’ by asking questions about successes and strengths on the premise that organisations will move towards that which they study (Cooperrider, Whitney & Stavros, 2003). AI is envisaged as a process assisting participants identify achievements and strengths (Elliott, 1999; Hammond & Royal, 1998; Watkins & Mohr, 2001). The goal of AI is to work from the "positive side of the conversation" (Fiorentino, 2012, p.220). However, AI is about the generative as much as it about the positive (Bushe, 2007) and as such does not ignore problems that need to be addressed.
In my own work, I have done three studies using AI and I hope to be involved in a another in the area of sport delivery into physical education later this year. In the projects I previously undertook, I used semi-structured interviews using the 4-D format (Giles & Kung, 2010, 2014) punctuated by observation of the participants’ practice with accompanying professional dialogue with the researcher playing the role of ‘pedagogical consultant’ to the participants wanting to further explore their practice.
The 4-D AI format consisted of:
1. Discovery:
Participants were questioned on when they felt they had been at their
pedagogical best to identify the moment, appreciate the moment, and capture the
thoughts. The data was therefore grounded in the experience of the participants
(Giles & Kung, 2010);
2. Dream:
Participants were questioned about possibilities and preferred futures they
would be proud of. This generated ideas for improved practice as well as limits
and constraints on their preferred pedagogical vision in their current context
as well as in the field of physical education generally. The interview was
therefore intentionally generative (Giles & Kung, 2010);
3. Design:
Value statements were identified to describe and focus the ‘vision’ of
possibilities which had emerged. For example, “Game Sense coaching changed my
relationship with players”, or ‘Sport Education is ideally suited to teaching
for achievement of Australian Curriculum HPE student achievement standards at
Year 9-10” are value statements. This part of the interviews involved the
researcher and participants in ‘grounded theory building’ capturing the story
of the practice (Troxel, 2002); and
4. Destiny/Delivery: Participants developed a set of intentions for practice to sustain, grow and develop the existing foundations for their pedagogical success.
An area I would like to look into is the possibility of a blended critical-appreciative action research approach. For example, the researcher identifying which questions are critical and which questions are appreciative. Another example could be beginning the action research with exploration of what is working and the development of value propositions associated with this practice so it is ‘held on to’ and amplified before moving to the critical perspective to identify what is not working and how the problems can be disrupted through an appropriate intervention.
My proposition is that AI contains the potential to balance the critical perspective of the field of physical education and sport coaching as essentially ‘problematic’, and present stories that paint portraits of practice at its best, as examples of possibility for others.
Appreciative inquiry papers
An appreciative inquiry exploring game sense teaching in physical education
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