Page 199 - Mike Ratner CC - WISR Complete Dissertation - v6

Appreciative inquiry is a collaborative approach to studying and changing

AI social systems such as groups, organisations, communities (Bushe, 2013;
Cooperrider et al., 2008).

Note: From “Participatory Action Learning and Action Research (PALAR) for Community

Engagement: A Theoretical Framework” by O. Zuber-Skerritt, Educational Research for Social

Change, 4(1), p. 7.

Most facilitators and group dialogue hosts I have talked with about leading Community

Conversations and civic discussion do so with a purposeful view (as I see this grad project) as a

mechanism for social change and within the process is the hope that will lead to an appropriate

approach agreed upon by the group members (after a series of CCs) that would emerge an enhanced

engagement among local leaders and neighbors within the wider community. The greater degree

of participation across barriers and divisions in theory would maximize effectiveness of

Community Conversations to create change and ideally build a growing coalition in the process.

Action research is a useful approach because it is a collaborative process that facilitates

simultaneous action and research (Coghlan and Brannick, 2005, p. 13). Traditional definitions of

action research suggest that the key elements are a collaborative relationship between the

researcher and the client, and that the research aims to address a task or problem and leads to the

generation of new knowledge. Different approaches have emerged under the umbrella of

traditional action research since Lewin’s (1946) early work (Coghlan and Brannick, 2005).

Elements of Participatory Action Research (PAR), and Participatory Action Learning (PAL) as

identified earlier were used for this research as an experimental approach in the fusing of two

separate processes. Lewin’s (1946) concept of Action Research was designed as a cyclical process

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