Zara, our current Knowledge Translation Specialist, was recently hired and attended our meeting this month. Welcome, Zara!
We began revising our Discovery questions to make them more accessible and relevant to our group. We recognised that the ‘circle of care’ for community clients may be broader, including friends, neighbours, relatives and so forth, and that relationships are very important at all levels – in the community, in long-term care homes, and in families.
At this meeting, we explored whether we wanted to ‘launch’ our project to the community at large, which yielded a larger discussion around whether or not we were ready to promote our project. By using open dialogue, we found that many of our members were feeling a bit lost. We have been meeting monthly, and have been working hard at establishing trusting relationships (authentic partnerships). We have been learning a lot about our partnership and the communities in which we are situated. We have had opportunities to learn about AI and the other philosophies driving our project. Yet, we felt like we were not really accomplishing anything that we initially set out to accomplish (Discover). Although this meeting may at first seem like a low point, this in fact was one of the most critical meetings to date. This meeting forced me and the other Partnerships in Dementia Care (PiDC) researchers to reflect on our process and recognise that while we were not making much way in terms of our Discovery (the first phase in Appreciative Inquiry (AI)) we were in fact working hard at something else, something that we later called Dawning. We recognised that what we had been doing was laying the foundation for Discovery. This Dawning phase is absolutely critical when using a participatory and collaborative approach to AI (click here to learn more about Dawning).
What a great meeting. This shows how important critical reflection and open dialogue are.
