No description available.

No description available.

This study is an examination of the role of story and storytelling within Appreciative Inquiry, a method of organizational change that orients around a consensus model building on individual and collective strengths instead of focusing on overcoming problems. Interviews with 12 Appreciative Inquiry practitioners were conducted, transcribed, and analyzed using a process of iterative coding consistent with a General Inductive method of qualitative research. Once consensus with a secondary coder was achieved, 6 themes emerged. The 6 emergent themes outlined general roles that story and storytelling plays in the Appreciative Inquiry process: relationship building, coauthoring a future, reframing narrative, narrative meaning, discovery, and engagement. No one of these categories seemed to guarantee success, and all success stories, shared during the interviews, incorporated something from all 6 of these categories. These categories also provide a possible framework for further study on how to optimize or incorporate more storytelling into Appreciative Inquiry practice.

Agile has been a methodology practiced with a significant scope, around the globe. The subject has been dealt with globally for some time now, producing a large databank of literature explaining its different tools and techniques, along with its usage. Ironically, the success rates of projects that have implemented Agile have been low, as they tend to face several challenges during the implementation process. The purpose of this paper is to explore and analyse knowledge, attitudes and behaviours towards change activities and Agile practices. To reach this objective, I will explore and analyse the understanding of the Agile mindset and investigate the potential contribution of positive psychology (AI) to address Agile adoption challenges within organizations and teams. The data collection process includes interviews with eight domain experts from India, Sweden and the Netherlands to essentially get an insight into their understanding and approach towards Agile, Appreciate Inquiry (AI) and Change management practices. The thematic analysis approach has been used to connect the findings with theory and detect themes. By ‘themes’ we mean: why we need Agile; the challenges and solutions for Agile; appreciative inquiry contribution towards Agile; and change as business-as-usual. The interviews and analysis yielded interesting insights; for instance, it showed that the informants often suffered from challenges due to various reasons, like understanding of this ‘unique’ methodology, one’s mindset and lack of leadership support.

The purpose of this bachelor’s thesis is to investigate school staff's attitudes towards sexual education for young people with disabilities, within special needs education in Sweden. The rhetorical analysis aims to include answers to what school staff members consider to be adequate sexual education, what obstacles and opportunities they see as well as how they experience their own and their students' rhetorical agency. The study was done through a qualitative focus group method and individual interviews, inspired by appreciative inquiry. They were held after RFSU Stockholm hosted a sexual education lesson for the students. The theoretical framework is based on Sonja K Foss and Cindy Griffin's invitational rhetoric, an intersectional understanding of power structures and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's definition of rhetorical agency. The results, developed through a thematization of the staff's responses, show that the staff have a positive attitude towards sexual education. Significant aspects within sexual education are consent, relationships and identities. The staff are aware of their position of power and that they influence students. It's important for them to have similar common ground in regards to the subject, leading students to gain correct information about HBTQI. They want to increase students' rhetorical agency in relationships, by building up students' self- esteem.

Parent involvement is one of the factors to which student achievement is consistently and strongly linked in educational research, and is perceived by teachers as a core factor affecting student achievement. Therefore more and higher-quality engagement with students' families has the potential to make a positive difference in urban schools. However, a tendency among educators to focus on perceived family deficits, without a clear understanding of students' families' strengths, may limit urban schools' ability to develop effective family engagement programming. This study involved faculty and staff members at an urban K-8 school in systematically identifying strengths of the low-income Puerto Rican families whose children made up the vast majority of the student body, as a critical point of reference for working with families toward stronger student outcomes. The study was grounded in the principles of Action Research and utilized methods associated with Appreciative Inquiry to involve school faculty and staff members in carrying out, then collectively analyzing the results from, structured interviews with parents of low-income Puerto Rican students at the school. Along with establishing a family strengths inventory for use in ongoing planning for enhancement of family engagement programming at the school, the study included an assessment of the impact of the research process on the perceptions and intended actions of both participating faculty and staff members and those who elected not to participate. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of implications and recommendations related to theory, practice, policy, and research associated with the efforts of schools serving low-income Puerto Rican (and other) communities to strengthen their engagement with students' families.

Yes / This paper addresses groupwork processes with a group of prisoners advising a research project in a maximum-security prison in England. The research project (Appreciative Inquiry into the Diversity Strategy of HMP Wakefield. RES-000-22-3441) was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and lasted 9 months. The research explored the experiences of prisoners in diverse minority groupings and the strategies of the prison to accommodate the complex needs of these groups. The Prisoner Advisory Group (PAG) was made up of representatives from Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) prisoners; older prisoners (over 60s); Disabled prisoners (with physical disabilities, learning difficulties; and mental health problems); Gay, Bi-sexual and Transgender prisoners; and prisoners affiliated to Faith groups. It met regularly during the research. The paper considers the forming norming and performing aspects of establishing an effective participant voice in a prison-based project. It considers the contribution of the PAG to developing a research strategy that engaged prisoners in the research. It reflects on the nature of ‘participative research’ in general and whether such research is possible within a high-security prison environment.

This thesis focuses on how distributed leadership affects school leaders’ practices. Two questions are asked: 1.              How does the architecture of practice affect school leadership in an effort to achieve distributed leadership? 2.              What happens to school leadership practice when the architecture changes?    The theoretical framework is based on practice theories which focuses on the context and askes: What happens here? In search of what surrounds the leadership practices, one looks for the arrangements which shape them. Together the arrangements make up an architecture which shapes the school leaders’ practice (Henning Loeb m.fl., 2019). The method used is action research (Reason & Bradbury, 2008), in particular the version called appreciative inquiry (Kadi-Hanifi, 2014). In their strife in doing the work better, a group of school leaders look towards a spreading of leadership activities and in building a strengthening of collective responsibility, which in short is what a distributed leadership means (Spillane, 2006). The material was analysed using practice theory and, using a five-step model (Yin, 2011), in combination with a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006).  The sum of the arrangements as they appeared in the time before the start of the project, locked the leadership up, where the feeling of being one step behind with a concern about tasks slipping and decisions made ad hoc marked the day. Since then, in alignment with changing arrangements, the school leaders’ practices have changed, making the school leaders better placed in spending more time preparing processes. Steps have been taken away from the details of the work which opens up for gaining a holistic view and being ahead.  Most research on distributed leadership is based on explaining the positive consequences for students, while knowledge of how it changes school leaders' practice is much more limited. Although the knowledge that has been built in this study is placed in time, place and space and as such not easily generalized it is interesting to learn more about how school leaders' practices are affected by its context. School leaders, if they succeed in their work, have a major impact on how teachers thrive and, by extension, to what extent they are motivated to make an effort to do a good job, which in turn has a major impact on how students succeed.

No description available.

Public health officials have declared the widespread use and misuse of prescription opioid medications an epidemic in the United States. The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Tom Frieden, has stated, “We know of no other medication routinely used for a nonfatal condition that kills patients so frequently” (Frieden & Houry, 2016, p. 1503). The present study was prompted by the concern that there is no empirical data on how law enforcement officers have been affected by the use of opioids. It is the first empirical examination of how the epidemic has impacted police officers' resilience and fitness for duty. The President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing identified officer health, wellness, and fitness for duty as one of the six pillars to support policing in the 21st century. The Task Force also affirmed the long-standing belief that the same character strengths that impel officers to confront danger may also be barriers to their resilience. Recognizing this "double-edged" sword, this mixed-methods study analyzed medical and prescription claims over a four year period (2011 to 2014) to examine the prevalence of opioid use by officers in a large urban police department. Using the qualitative, interview-based methodology of Appreciative Inquiry (AI), it examined individual, organizational and systems-level factors explaining officers’ help-seeking for use of prescription medications, as well as help-seeking for substance abuse in general. The interviews also revealed what is needed to replace the existing cultural and organizational arrangements—which can lead to isolation, depression, pathology, and stigma—with a culture that has the necessary processes and commitment to promote physical, behavioral and mental resiliency. The quantitative analyses revealed that law enforcement officers are not immune from the opioid epidemic. Moreover, there is evidence of specific prescription drug use behaviors that indicate sub-groups of officers at heightened risk for developing an opioid use disorder. Approximately 40% of the officers in the sample filled an opioid prescription. Within this group, 27% of the officers filled a prescription for 90 days or longer and 34% filled prescriptions for benzodiazepines. The data also indicates that approximately 1 out of 7 officers in the sample received medical treatment for a mental illness each year. The qualitative data revealed that officers’ help-seeking behaviors for opioid dependence and abuse were shaped by the psychological process of surrendering and acknowledging their vulnerability. Seeking help, therefore, can run contrary to officers’ training and character traits. Additionally, the social supports of the police subculture and effective supervisory leadership contributed to officers’ recovery and resilience from opioid use disorder. Having access to trustworthy and culturally competent treatment services further enhanced officers’ recovery. The research also illuminates broader health care policies and commitments to wellness that can enhance the capacity of police agencies to hire, develop, and maintain resiliency in their officers. This dissertation extends Bronfenbrenner’s theory of resilience to the field of law enforcement. This theory adopts a social ecological perspective, capturing pathways and protective factors at micro, meso and macro levels that bolster officers’ personal growth and development. From a policy perspective, the findings support an asset-based approach to wellness, which stresses the need to access and enlist resources across the micro-, meso- and macro-level spheres. Future research in this area should extend knowledge into the unique cultural context of police work and its implications for the promotion of wellness and resiliency. / Criminal Justice