USING APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY AND

DIALOGICAL LEARNING TO EXPLORE

DOMINANT PARADIGMS

Mary Grace Neville

Southwestern University

Experiential learning theory, conversational learning, and seminar practices

combine to shape an educational experience that is grounded in principles of
appreciative inquiry. The seminar, taught to undergraduate business majors,
seeks to encourage students to explore their underlying assumptions about
business in society. Because postindustrial globalization renders business
and society interdependent, the innovative pedagogy assumes educators hold
responsibility for creating and fostering new skills in business students.
Critical thinking, self-awareness, and values analysis skills support students
seeking to engage with and innovate based on perspectives different from
their own. A transferable methodology is proposed.

Keywords: pedagogy; undergraduate business curriculum; experiential

learning; dialogical learning; appreciative inquiry

Today’s highly interdependent world increasingly requires business

students to recognize and understand diverse perspectives. Understanding
others requires an awareness of self. And self-awareness requires an under-
standing of one’s conscious thinking as well as an understanding of the
assumptions on which one’s thinking rests. These assumptions are most often
unstated, frequently subconscious, and therefore called “underlying assump-
tions.” They form implicit criteria by which people evaluate situations and

Author’s Note: I extend my appreciation to Dr. A. J. Senchack for his work on an earlier ver-
sion of this article and for his continued enthusiasm about and support for the course
described here. I also thank the reviewers for providing valuable comments and suggestions
on earlier versions and Lindsey Godwin for editorial support. This work is possible because
of my teachers, who cultivated curiosity, and my students, who willingly engage with me in
learning. Readers may contact me directly for supplemental materials.

JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION, Vol. 32 No. 1, February 2008 100-117

DOI: 10.1177/1052562907305558
© 2008 Organizational Behavior Teaching Society

100

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 Neville / APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY AND DIALOGICAL LEARNING 101

make decisions. For example, the dominant Western business paradigm rests
on an underlying assumption valuing efficiency. An American traveler to
Tanzania, where an underlying assumption values community, recommended
to two women ways they could reorganize their work such that one of the two
women could return to the village and complete other tasks. The women were
confused and asked, “Why would we give a job to one person that two people
can do just as well?” The American and the Tanzanians held different under-
lying assumptions about what “good work” meant.
Underlying assumptions serve to help us interpret data and formulate
opinions. However, in doing so, underlying assumptions can also limit our
ability to imagine alternatives that rest on different assumptions, particularly
if we do not recognize the assumptions on which our ideas rest. Therefore,
management educators hold an obligation to enhance students’ ability to rec-
ognize their underlying assumptions. In doing so, educators teach students
to responsibly engage with others, and with the diverse perspectives of
others, in our increasingly global world.
Traditional pedagogy suggests a technical-functional approach to learning.
Students receive knowledge from a professor, engage in problem solving,
and seek to maximize wealth from autonomous points of view, for example,
a single firm or an individual. Although appropriate for the metaphor of
business as a machine (where parts can be exchanged and outcomes calculated),
education increasingly needs to adapt to newer metaphors for business
(such as business as a living system embedded in social ecosystems).
Increasingly, business requires students to step outside of themselves
and consider alternatives to status quo. Competition has moved to a global
scale, technology innovation increasingly has both beneficial and detrimental
outcome possibilities, and people of many different belief systems seek to
collaborate. Metaphorically, fish can benefit from attuning to their experience
of swimming in and breathing water, their dominant paradigm in this analogy.
This article explains a dialogical education process that seeks to teach
students how to interact with each other and with their own belief systems
in constructive, affirmative, and imaginative ways.
The course described here and its requisite teaching philosophy rest on
underlying assumptions drawn from appreciative inquiry (AI), an organiza-
tional change approach. Conversational learning and experiential learning
theory (ELT) combine to inform both the course process and design. The
course uses a seminar format and seeks to engage students in anticipatory
learning activities. This article outlines each theory, suggests additional
resources for deeper theoretical study, and offers implementation sugges-
tions for faculty seeking to conduct or to transfer the course concept into
their own curriculum. I teach the seminar course to undergraduate business
majors each year. Some of their experiences are included as well.

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102 JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION / February 2008

Assumptions: AI Principles

AI provides the theoretical stance for my classroom behavior and the

curriculum design. AI is most commonly known as an organizational
change approach whereby whole systems convene and inquire into that
which brings life to the organization (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987,
1990). AI assumes that all organizations, including a classroom, are living
systems simultaneously influencing and being influenced by that which is
around them. This matters pedagogically because it suggests that what
happens in the classroom influences (and is influenced by) the students,
the university community, and by extrapolation, the larger society. For a
corporate organization, the implication holds that business is inextricably
linked with local and global society. In fact, business can be perceived as
interdependent with society.
AI recognizes the power of the whole. Whether individuals benefit from
the sense of community and camaraderie of something larger than them-
selves, or whether ideas evolve with an enhanced richness when stemming
from multiple voices, the organizational change approach brings representa-
tives of whole systems into a dialogue. This holds in a classroom when
students are perceived as valuable cocreators of whatever occurs. Similarly,
whole systems have a holographic quality; representations of the whole and
subsets of the whole can collaborate before taking their ideas out to other
subsets. In the classroom, this implies that students are not only part of a
short-term course configuration (generally about 15 weeks long), but
students are also a microcosm of society at large. Therefore, by engaging in
dialogue together in a seminar, the same students are learning to take their
dialogical ability out into the larger society.
I outline the five most commonly discussed AI principles in Table 1.
Originally described by Cooperrider and Srivastva (1987), AI paradigm
rests on these principles: the constructionist principle (suggesting that
organizational destiny is interwoven with social knowledge), the principle
of simultaneity (recognizing that change occurs with every intervention and
inquiry), the poetic principle (describing organizations metaphorically as
books being coauthored and cocreated by everyone involved), the anticipa-
tory principle (insisting that our collective imagination holds the highest
potential for anticipating possibilities and positive outcomes), and the
positive principle (explaining that momentum for lasting positive change
requires momentum, social bonding, and meaningful experiences). Each of
these principles informs the stance I take in the course design proposed here
(see Table 1 for direct pedagogical and teaching philosophy implications of
each principle).
Cooperrider, Sorensen, Whitney, and Yaeger (2000) use these words
among others to describe AI: “co-evolutionary,” “systematic discovery,”

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 Neville / APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY AND DIALOGICAL LEARNING 103

TABLE 1
Principles of Appreciative Inquiry Informing Pedagogical Environment
Applied to dialogic learning environment,
The appreciative paradigm is based on the the principles offer the following foundational
following principles: course design assumptions:

The Constructionist Principle: Social Implication:

knowledge and organizational destiny are • Self-awareness supports understanding other.
interwoven. To be effective, all of us must • Locus of knowledge is in the relationship with
be adept in the art of understanding, read- other.
ing, and analyzing organizations as living • Innovation can occur through collaboration.
human constructions. • “Inquiry projects” signify that paradigms are
emergent bodies of knowledge.

The Principle of Simultaneity: Here it is Implication:

recognized that inquiry and change are • The process by which we choose to engage
not truly separate moments but are students and the world matters.
simultaneous. Inquiry is intervention. • Inquiring into that which is different can create
The seeds of organizational change are intellectual and paradigmatic expansion.
implicit in the very first questions we ask.
The Poetic Principle: A metaphor here is Implication:
that human organizations are an open • Student dialogue or opinions in this course can-
book. An organization's story is con- not be “wrong”; they can only be more or less
stantly being coauthored or cocreated by well-supported perspectives.
those living in it. • Teachers can often speak from a place of more
experience and more reading than our students
but not from a place of rightness or inherent
authority.
• “Inquiry projects” represent living and emergent
systems, not proofs or defenses.
The Anticipatory Principle: The most impor- Implication:
tant resource we have for generating con- • Educators hold responsibility for creating experi-
structive organizational change or ences whereby students learn to explore multiple
improvement is our collective imagination perspectives beyond their own and to imagine
and our capacity to unleash the imagina- beyond what is.
tions and minds of groups. • Anticipatory learning encourages students to
explore the implications of their actions and per-
spectives, e.g., “if taken to its logical conclusion,
your idea suggests . . .”
The Positive Principle: Momentum for Implication:
change requires large amounts of positive • Experiencing positive affect and social bonding
affect and social bonding-things such as in any setting, classroom seminar, or organiza-
hope, inspiration, caring, camaraderie, tion creates capacity for students to recreate pos-
sense of urgent purpose, and sheer joy in itive affect and social bonding in other
creating something meaningful together are situations.
all essential to peak moments in organiza- • Students can reflect on and draw peak moments
tional effectiveness. from their shared dialogic experience as well as
they can draw peak moments from organizations
later in life—the seminar becomes a training
ground for positive potential.

SOURCE: Cooperrider, Sorensen, Whitney, & Yaeger (2000).

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104 JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION / February 2008

“what gives life,” and “constructively capable in the economic, ecological

and human terms” (p. 3). In AI, whole systems convene because, as Whitney
and Cooperrider (2000) say,

you get the sense that you are connected to a goodness that comes from the
power of the whole. You realize you really need one another. . . . It elimi-
nates false assumptions about other people and other groups. When you get to
know someone you realize they aren’t exactly what you imagined them to be.
You develop compassion for different people instead of judgments. (p.15).

As an educator, I seek to evoke these capabilities within students. Therefore,

I have designed a course where the focus is the inquiry and dialogical learning
process. I seek to cultivate students who can imagine and understand what
might become rather than students who merely accept what is.
My experience suggests that this approach appears radical (to some
colleagues and to some students) because I emphasize the way in which
readings and discussion can lead students to explore what most gives life
to their beliefs. By doing so, I encourage students to actively become pos-
itive influences on all that they encounter, thereby fostering the capacity
for life-long learning.

Teaching Approach: Anticipatory, Conversational,

and Experiential Learning

The seminar format course described here most significantly contributes

to management education because of the blended process resting on appre-
ciative underlying assumptions discussed above. Therefore, course content
explained here is done so for example purposes only. I encourage educators
to transfer the approach into other curricula beyond undergraduate business
where my course is offered.

Seminar experience. Like traditional seminars, my course convenes between

8 and 12 students to engage in conversation around text and ideas (see
McCormick & Kahn, 1987, for tactical coaching on how to generate collabo-
rative conversation in seminars). However, unlike traditional seminars, where
the teacher has a clear impression of the key points students most need to grasp
from the assigned readings and where the teacher serves to guide students
through the text, here the teacher is a coexplorer. My job in the classroom is
to facilitate exploration by listening for where students resonate. I then must
inquire with students into that which brings and that which limits their energy.
Yballe and O’Connor (2000) describe the role of teacher in appreciative ped-
agogy as “similar to a child in a candy store with limited time and a deluge of
rich experiences, the professor must choose the experiences to make figural
for the day” (p. 474).

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 Neville / APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY AND DIALOGICAL LEARNING 105

My assumption is that the seminar group is a whole system composed of

highly interdependent minds. I have no implicit hierarchical right to the
best ideas. I rely on the AI assumption that goodness can be found in the
whole. So rather than accentuating individual contributions, my own or
those of others, my job is to accentuate the whole by identifying and lifting
up for students the links and paradoxes among our ideas. Being part of the
process encourages students to notice the power found in being part of an
emergent dialogue larger than themselves. The process teaches awareness,
on the part of faculty and students, and therefore requires mindful attention.

Anticipatory learning. Briefly, anticipatory learning (Botkin, Elmandjra, &

Malitza, 1979) is a set of practices that aid people in understanding and
doing what has never been done before. It depends on collaborative, socially
constructed knowledge and is especially adept at preparing communities of
people who must first learn before acting wisely in the world. For example,
if as a collective we could adequately anticipate how waste from a new
plant or a certain product could responsibly be disposed of, engineers might
be better equipped to design to that anticipatory image.
Given that an educational objective in college is to train future leaders to
listen and act wisely, teaching students to anticipate the outcomes or impli-
cations of their thinking helps. For instance, in the course, participants are
encouraged to “try on” new ideas and roles different from roles they might
normally play. So when we read about international financial markets,
students are encouraged to anticipate what their lives might be like as a
member of a very different socioeconomic class or as part of an ostracized
minority group. In Western culture, with a business emphasis on decision
making, execution, and outcomes, it is easy to engage in rapid action with-
out anticipatory learning. (See Rhea, 2003, for a discussion about anticipa-
tory learning in business applications.)

Conversational learning. Baker, Jensen, and Kolb (2005) define conversa-

tional learning as “a process whereby learners construct new meaning and
transform their collective experiences into knowledge through their con-
versations” (p. 412). I address experiential learning below. At its core,
though, conversational learning suggests that learners are constructing
meaning among themselves as well as within themselves and that learn-
ers transform their collective experiences—both tacit and explicit—into
knowledge. This differs significantly from the presumption that establish-
ment and authority are responsible for and best equipped to create knowl-
edge and meaning for others.
Conversational learning offers an alternative to what Friere (1973) calls
the banker model of education. Rather than teachers depositing knowledge
into students’ minds and asking students to withdraw requested ideas,

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106 JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION / February 2008

teachers foster conversation through which students engage in and make

meaning of their experience with text and ideas. For example, a banker
model discussion of reading materials would ensure that students grasp, and
be prepared to recite during an exam, the author’s key points. Conversational
learning begins with the author’s key points and relies on student discussion
to experiment with interpretations that these points generate in their own
thinking about their own perspectives about business. Therefore, an article
about reconstructing a socialist economy post–World War II might become
a conversational experience about which students can compare and contrast
their views of capitalist economies. When socialist verses capitalistic
economies are discussed in a banker model, the student need only remem-
ber the definition and key characteristics without needing to formulate and
internalize his personal perspectives and views. If the student needs to recite
information, he also now knows how to access it beyond himself. Knowledge
and meaning therefore exist both within the individual and through a collec-
tive experience, as well as in the author’s original text.
Baker et al. (2005) offer that conversational learning also can be the expe-
riential learning component in Kolb’s (1984) cycle of development for ELT.
Kolb makes a case for conversational learning as the strongest mode of expe-
riential learning and suggests that conversation is vital to understanding
human experience (see Kayes, 2002, for implications and a review of cri-
tiques). Understanding our own human experience requires exploring the
underlying assumptions on which our own views and value judgments rest.
ELT. Kolb’s (1984) ELT emphasizes the central role experience plays in
the learning process. At a theoretical level, Kolb asserts that individuals learn
in multidimensional ways, actively apprehending and comprehending infor-
mation and experiences by grasping experiences and by theoretically under-
standing an experience (see Figure 1). Experience then gets transformed into
meaning or knowledge as a learner experiments with and reflects on theory.
In accordance with Baker et al. (2005), I argue that the experience of focused
conversation generates a valuable source of knowledge. The conversation I
particularly seek in this course focuses students on intropsychic and inter-
personal beliefs and views about business in society. The phenomenon we
study is underlying assumptions of the dominant paradigm.
Experiential learning most commonly refers to education through
hands-on and direct experience. Academia generally reserves experiential
for pedagogy such as service learning, simulations, and field projects.
Students respond well to applied projects. Therefore, this course includes
an “inquiry project” as the hands-on, active experiential part of the design.
The project, described in more depth below, seeks to extend students’ class-
room conversations by asking students to actively inquire into a particular
topic or phenomenon of interest. Now, in addition to the conversational
component of ELT, students benefit from the hands-on part of ELT. In both

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 Neville / APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY AND DIALOGICAL LEARNING 107

Concrete Experience

Grasping via
APPREHENSION

Active Reflective
Transformation via Transformation via
Experimentation Observation
EXTENSION INTENSION

Grasping via
COMPREHENSION

bAbsract
Ab s Conceptualization

Figure 1: The Experiential Learning Cycle of Development

SOURCE: Kolb (1984).

approaches, the course seeks to encourage students to experience and create

knowledge from “the inside out” rather than to rely only on expert knowledge
to be allocated from the outside in (Hunt, 1987, p. 2).
By blending AI’s focus on fostering curiosity about that which gives life
with ELT’s emphasis on beginning with one’s experience to create knowl-
edge, the project facilitates student exploration of their own principles.
Linking anticipatory learning theory and conversational learning theory
suggests that through conversation about visions for a hopeful future,
students manifest experience from which they can choose to engage the
larger global system over time.

Curriculum and Course Design

The purpose for developing this course within a business curriculum

stems from my belief that individuals can and do matter in shaping our
present and therefore in shaping our future. As an educator, I am therefore
responsible for teaching both the dominant and the marginal paradigms.
My assumptions about 21st-century business rely on the belief that virtu-
ally every item on the global agenda for change can be addressed because
(a) business and society are inextricably linked, (b) local action has global
implication because all systems are interdependent, and (c) a sustainable

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108 JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION / February 2008

future requires individuals to have an awareness of and deep regard for the
interdependent way in which our business and our human and environ-
mental systems function. In this paradigm, neither business nor societies
can be sustained for the long-term without the other. Therefore, I adopt the
appreciative stance, convene a seminar, and encourage dialogical learning
such that students begin to grasp both their responsibility for being wise
and their own beliefs about how best to act wisely.
This course therefore holds a social change agenda as well as a life-long
learning objective. For example, I ask students to anticipate the implications
of our postindustrial economic perspective that advocates corporations’
maximizing short-term financial profits. Maximization is a corporation’s top
priority. Quickly they consider environmental concerns, worker and human
rights movements, intricate global trade relationships, and corporate ethical
scandals. However, when I introduce the possibility that a company might
manage to a triple bottom line—profit, people, and planet (Elkington,
1998)—students quickly become nervous. Their well-developed sense of
competition comes out. They might believe a triple bottom line is concep-
tually attractive, but they do not want to manage a company to anything but
the financial bottom line because the first movers doing so “will get their
lunch eaten” (student comment). Some then formulate inquiry projects to
explore companies that have in fact begun managing to a triple bottom line.
By asking students to engage conversationally, to inquire appreciatively, and
to design their ideal future world experientially, the course seeks to foster
in tomorrow’s business leaders a belief in what might be possible.
This seminar course develops leadership values and competencies in
identity formation for the 21st century. Specifically, students are asked to
do three things: build AI skills as a method for seeking best practices,
expand their theoretical and practical understanding of the global life-web
often invisible to business decision makers, and articulate their underlying
assumptions about business. These expectations transfer to other disciplines
because although content and theoretical paradoxes change by discipline,
the challenge remains to teach students how to recognize complex assump-
tions and how to anticipate consequences of action and of inaction.

Student population. This approach has been used for five semesters with
undergraduate business majors in a small liberal arts college in Texas. In
general, these 20- to 21-year-old students come from upper-middle-class,
regional backgrounds. They tend to be more politically and fiscally conser-
vative than nonbusiness students on the campus. They have limited, if any,
experience with self-directed learning, and few have studied cross-culturally
or traveled internationally (family vacations being the exception). Therefore
assignments—readings, discussions, and projects—are constructed to dia-
logically engage students in that which is foreign to them.

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 Neville / APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY AND DIALOGICAL LEARNING 109

Reading assignments. To “engage” students, I attempt to meet the students

where they generally are. I work to overcome students’ natural defenses,
psychological fight–flight responses, by beginning with ideas and content
likely to be paradigmatically comfortable for them. Early, I assign readings
analyzing as is. Readings first come from established sources, such as the
Economist. I encourage self-reflection about perceptions of the college
community and their position in it (often marginal among peers). And we
discuss the “truths” they hold from their family of origin. My early objec-
tive is creating “safe space” for honest conversation.
By the second module, the content becomes more provocative. My expe-
rience suggests that students engage in provocative literature only when a
class culture exists in which they feel safe from grade penalty and safe from
peer pressure or faculty judgment. “Safe space” is essential to this process.
One example reading in the second module comes from Wolfgang Sachs’s
(1992) Development Dictionary. Sachs edited the volume of perspectives
about globalization and industrial development; the authors speak from
marginalized and minority paradigms. One chapter challenges the notion
that industrialization is inherently worthwhile, and the second critiques
the dominance conveyed through the language choice when a country is
described as “Third” World. For many students, these readings serve to spot-
light their personal and implicit assumptions that all countries are better
off in all ways when following an American industrialized-development
model. As faculty, I encourage students to try on alternatives to better
understand their existing beliefs.
A third content module focuses on moments of anticipatory learning
(Botkin et al., 1979), organizations choosing environmentally or socially
sustainable structures and behaviors, and cases of nontraditional collaboration.
I assign Willis Harman’s (1998) book Global Mind Change as an example
of a paradigmatic change with anticipatory and appreciative aspirations.
By the time students reach this content module, they are generally more
open to dialogical learning than at the semester’s beginning. Therefore, the
experiential aspect of dialogical learning becomes more significant.

Inquiry project. In addition to the classroom engagement, students conduct

an “inquiry project.” The objective of the project is to foster imagination of
what might be possible within a topic of the student’s choice. The inquiry
project is titled as such because, distinct from a traditional research paper
in which students seek to develop an authoritative perspective, this project
encourages students to inquire into a topic’s global implications, to seek out
and incorporate multiple perspectives on the topic, and through the process,
to learn more about one’s own underlying assumptions about the world (as
well as those of alternative perspectives).

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TABLE 2
Evaluation Rubric for Inquiry Project
Project 2: Progress 3: Development
Stage 1: Topic Choice Report Presentation 4: Final Project

Project 15% 15% Not graded 70%

grade
weight
Learning • Identify an • Practice pro- • Present complex • Cultivate an aware-
objective issue of per- ject manage- ideas orally and ness of that which is
sonal signifi- ment skills concisely different from self
cance • Practice telling • Identify and • Foster innovative
• Experience a systematic clearly articu- learning
appreciative story from dis- late a felt need • Foster felt sense of
frame on an parate data • Lead a group in regard for other
issue dialogic learn- (social responsibility)
• Practice pro- ing experience • Encourage cross-
ject manage- • Open one’s disciplinary thinking
ment skills thinking to • Experience inquiry
insight and as form of life-long
contribution learning
from others
Success • Identifies an • Topic clearly • Engages class- • Takes a critical
criteria issue and framed in mates in con- stance on an issue
focal question appreciative versation about relevant to course
relating stance own topic content and to
(broadly) to • Documents • Demonstrates student’s personal or
an intersec- progress ability to learn professional interest
tion between exploring per- from and with • Identifies and
business and spectives (pri- others through explores underlying
society mary or conversation assumptions (own
• Outlines issue secondary • Demonstrates and others')
• Lists prelimi- sources) willingness to • Integrates ideas
nary appre- • Demonstrates advance own from multiple
ciative evolved think- thinking sources
questions for ing about the through feed- • Incorporates insights
interviews topic back from at least four AI
• Identifies • Is written interviews, at least
three poten- clearly and two with non-
tial intervie- concisely in Americans, and at
wees memo format least one with some-
• Is written one holding explic-
clearly and itly different view
concisely in than one’s own
memo format • Demonstrates
writing proficiency

NOTE: The inquiry project represents 40% of a student's total course grade. Forty percent is earned
by attending and actively participating in class discussions and activities. Twenty percent is earned
through a midsemester essay exam that asks students to formulate personal perspectives about busi-
ness and society supported and challenged by course readings to date.

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 Neville / APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY AND DIALOGICAL LEARNING 111

Because human systems move in the direction of what they study,

students’ choice of what to study—what to focus systemic attention on—is
both essential and strategic in the larger course objective (encouraging
students to grapple with their own underlying assumptions about business
in society). The project teaches inquiry as an approach to life-long learning,
requires that students seek out and engage with people whose perspectives
differ from their own, and insists they consider their topic from multiple
disciplinary perspectives. The perspectives include, among others, manage-
ment, economics, sociology, and history. Table 2 summarizes the project’s
learning objectives and success criteria.

Topic selection. The appreciative perspective often makes sense to students in

abstract conceptual terms far more quickly than in experience. The topic
selected ultimately provides a framework for collecting stories, discovering
and sharing best practices, and creating a knowledge-rich view of business
possibilities in our diverse world. Therefore, I invest time in preparing students
theoretically and experientially in AI as a way to introduce the project.
To explore AI theory, I rely on traditional course materials drawn from
available sources such as Cooperrider et al. (2000). I explain AI as a process
for organizational change, show appreciative interview guides used by corpo-
rations, and give students techniques for conducting open-ended interviews.
Then, I engage them experientially. I ask students to conduct mini-
appreciative interviews about their own peak learning and educational
experiences. Students are paired and asked to look back at their lifetime of
education and learning to recall an experience or time when they felt most
alive and involved in and excited about their learning. They interview each
other and practice reporting back to the class. The data generated collec-
tively provide students the opportunity to practice noticing themes and pat-
terns among their stories.
Armed with a modicum of hands-on experience and a handful of theory
papers, students are asked to select and frame a topic into which they want
to inquire (see Table 3 for guidelines and questions useful in stimulating
student thinking). The ensuing inquiry draws on primary and secondary
data, blends personal and external perspectives, and seeks possibilities
rather than definitive proofs or statistically reliable outcomes. Students
agree with me on deadlines for the following three checkpoints and final
outcome. The final product serves as their seminar course final exam.

Stage 1: Inquiry Memo 1, topic choice. Students draft a memo outlining

their inquiry topic, including potential appreciative questions they might
use to interview others. At this stage, however, students often inadvertently
present deficit-based problem statements and outline a research path to
“prove” rather than to inquire. By writing this memo, students experience

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TABLE 3
Ideas for Framing Your Inquiry Topic
The following questions help prompt students to identify and to reflect on topics of
particular interest or personal concern.
Guiding ideas to keep in mind:
1. Choose something really interesting to you about business and the world.
2. Recall the “question” you formulated on the first day of class—if everyone in
the world would think about one question, what would you most want that ques-
tion to be?
3. Is there an industry or an agenda you hope to pursue after graduation and/or
later in life? How can this project move you to a place of deeper understanding?
4. Remember that this project is about inquiring (an action orientation); stay in a
space of curiosity and action, even though the assignment looks like your aver-
age research paper.

Sample ideas to ponder from questions you have posed in class:

1. What does “agency” look like when moving from stockholder thinking to stake-
holder thinking? What is agency theory? How does it play out in small busi-
nesses? In corporations? How does agency change/get more complicated when
within one nation compared to when occurring across national boundaries?
When a small company along an international supply chain compared to an
international corporation or a global corporation?
2. In what ways might we innovate on our current market economy thinking for
global wealth creation?
3. How might business be a catalyzing force for peace in a world of transnational
business?
4. How are some companies innovating beyond accusations that “globalization
means a race to the bottom on labor and environmental standards?”

the difficulty for all of us who are trained in and socially steeped in problem-
based thinking, opening our curiosity to appreciate rather than prove or
disprove perspectives different than our own. For example, rather than
inquiring into violence in urban areas, a student begins to shift his focus to
inquiring into the possibility for safety in the streets. Generally, I coach such a
shift by asking anticipatory questions. Doing so supports students in reframing
their topic construction such that the outcomes might be generative possi-
bilities (safe streets) rather than clearer problem situations (violence in
urban areas). See Table 4 contrasting topic choices from a problem-solving
and an appreciative perspective.

Stage 2: Inquiry Memo 2, progress report. Approximately 3 weeks later,

students submit a second memo outlining their progress to date. I encourage
students to codify where they are in their work rather than seek to retrofit
their report to match Memo 1. The inquiry topic has generally changed

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TABLE 4
Sample Research Questions: Problem Solving
Contrasted with Appreciative Inquiry
Problem-Solving Approach Appreciative-Inquiry Approach

“Felt need” Appreciating and valuing

Identification of problem The best of “what is”

Q: What’s the biggest problem with Q: What public policies and business practices
Superfund sites: contaminating exist that simultaneously enhance a business’s
surrounding neighborhoods, cleaning financial efficiency and our community-level
the sites after use, or companies’ environmental sensitivity?
funding alternative disposal means?

Analysis of causes Envisioning “what might be”

Q: What are the dominant reasons Q: What enhances social system sustainability?
futurists say our global social system
is not sustainable?

Analysis of possible solutions Dialoguing “what should be”

Q: How can GDP better measure a Q: What should we be measuring if we most

country’s well-being, because national want to understand different nations’
production measures do not seem to long-term,holistic well-being?
reflect individual happiness?

Action planning (Treatment) Innovating “what will be”

Q: What can we, regular citizens, do to Q: What actions can we, regular citizens, take to
educate politicians about how cultivate public policies that help foster a
measures such as GDP do and do not socially and fiscally just world in light of our
really represent a country’s well-being? transnational interdependencies?

NOTE: The table represents types of research questions and sample areas of student curiosity
framed as problem-solving questions and reframed as appreciative-inquiry topics. This builds
on Cooperrider and Srivastva’s (1987) framework for shifting from a problem-solving to an
appreciative-inquiry approach.

(often rather significantly) between the topic choice memo and this
progress report. Students include here their evolved thinking about the
topic, progress to date, work in progress, and a critical analysis of perspec-
tives (one’s own and others’) identified to date. Finally, students are asked
to anticipate what questions and challenges they might soon face. Doing so
not only supports anticipatory thinking, but it also lets them begin to think
about how to use their Stage 3 class time.

Stage 3: Project development presentations. Students self-organize to present

their work in progress to classmates. The objective is to collaboratively and
dialogically improve their work toward a final written project. In Kahn’s
(1974) language about seminars, this exercise challenges students to construct
a “barn-raising” experience rather than “beauty contest.” Remember, students

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114 JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION / February 2008

are preprogrammed that presentations mean formal telling rather than devel-
opmental opportunities to inquire with others. Faculty coaching helps. Every
student is expected to participate in the development of each other’s ideas.

Stage 4: Final inquiry project. This written culmination becomes the seminar
course final exam. By this stage, students have expanded their perspectives
and often changed their own underlying assumptions from where they
began in Stage 1. Interviews, theory, and personal experience form the dis-
covery and dream phases of AI, and students are expected to write discus-
sions that move dreams forward toward designing business, social, and
economic practices for the 21st century. Best papers therefore read as
tapestries of ideal visions, varied perspectives, and mainstream as well as
marginalized voices.

The Teaching Plan: Facilitating Inquiry

and Following Emergent Interests

Success and failure for a teacher in this course depend on one’s own
ability to create and hold safe dialogical space for students, to create a
sense of dignity in their learning process, and to nudge students when they
demonstrate curiosity or an emerging interest in topics. This success measure
is markedly different than a traditional classroom, where a teacher’s success
can be measured by the teacher’s ability to cover complex materials and the
students’ ability to “do well” on tests reciting or processing learned material.
Here, the foremost objective in a daily teaching plan includes awareness
and facilitation of the inquiry process.
Maintaining awareness requires tremendous invisible work. A teacher
must simultaneously stay aware of self, of personal biases and beliefs, of
student interest, of group dynamics, of seminar techniques, and of teaching
objective (creating safe and appreciative dialogic space in which students
can notice and grapple with their own underlying assumptions). Several
times per semester, a student asks me, “What are we going to do today?”
Ideally, I am present enough to gently respond, “I don’t know, but in about
75 minutes I’ll let you know what I think we did.” (Sincerity matters lest
such a response be perceived as cynical and therefore threatening.) This
response requires letting go of my hope for what might occur and believing
that what occurs is inherently valuable; letting go of my intention for select-
ing or assigning the particular reading at the particular time, believing that
cocreated dialogue can quite possibly generate better outcomes than I could
independently design; and letting go of my preconceived ideas about what
students most need to absorb in the coming session, trusting that they will
absorb what they most need for their learning journey.

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Faculty must believe in the pedagogical process to safely encourage

students to join the new approach to learning. For example, students experi-
ence enormous frustration with me for “not teaching” based on their own
learned behaviors that “good teachers” tell and “good students” listen. Similarly,
positivistic science encourages students to prove or disprove rather than to
inquire into possibilities, alternatives, and difference. Therefore, the inquiry
project (inquiring into perspectives different from your own) challenges
students with critical thinking but also evokes psychological resistance of
doing that which runs paradigmatically counter to their socialization. Faculty
must remain humble, confident, and alert to navigate this process.

Student Performance and Feedback: Preliminary Results

Students generally emerge from the process demonstrating a high degree

of critical thinking, a solid inquiry, and sometimes even profound views
about business. Course evaluation feedback includes comments such as “I
really had to think in this course,” “This is what college is supposed to be
about,” and “Fantastic.” However, the journey can be difficult; students and
I both experience early frustration with the slow process. For example, by
Week 3, students begin to get anxious about whether they are actually
learning because they have listened to each other rather than listened to me
lecture. By Week 5, if students are ignoring the readings, my temptation to
threaten students with an extra quiz or test surges. When discussion shifts
from assigned readings to job searches or a weekend activity, my task
becomes identifying links and open-ended questions that reengage students
in the larger course dialogue.
Holding to the process remains crucial. But our conditioning works
against us—students and faculty-learner alike. We experientially learn in
elementary and high schools that as students, we are bank vaults to be
filled with the gold wisdom dispensed by the teacher. When the teacher
asks for a withdrawal, we the students are expected to regurgitate back
precisely what the teacher has solicited. Freire (1973) attributes the
dumbing down to a state of oppressor–oppressed that this “banker model”
of education creates.
Relevant to this course, faculty must remain sensitive to the pedagogical
implications of asking students to inquire openly into their assumptions;
culturally, students have dutifully learned that such curiosity is not what
makes them “successful” in traditional academic settings. Indeed, students
find both authentic dialogue and naming their personal passions exciting
yet often difficult. Both are required for successful experiences.
Faculty face similar (and often equally difficult) challenges semester
long. We are trained to dispense wisdom, to evaluate and pass judgment
on, and to assign a grade to each of “our” students. To create safe dialogic

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116 JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION / February 2008

space in which students can legitimately explore, the challenge often is

simply to be quiet. This pedagogy calls on the student to experience and
inquire; this differs from a traditional seminar where faculty might be
actively involved and directive in shaping the discussion. Here, the out-
comes of any session cannot easily be forecasted. Because students are
well conditioned to regurgitate what the faculty professes, the risk is very
high for faculty to let their own views, underlying assumptions, and per-
sonal passions for inquiry topics influence what students perceive as valu-
able or, worse, “right.” Therefore, the faculty challenge remains to create
safe space for authentic interaction and to engage in ways that stir students
to question and explore their own perspectives.

Limitations, Adaptations, and Transferability

Students need a core body of knowledge in their selected disciplines.

This course design does not test apprehension or comprehension of explicit
knowledge. The design is not always the right curricular choice. A second
limitation is the high degree of interpersonal competence required of faculty.
Even though the design and process imply that students should inquire,
doing so makes students vulnerable in the moment. Therefore, faculty must
have a reputation among students of being what students might describe as
“on our side.” And faculty must have skills at facilitating group and inter-
personal dynamics.
I have tested this process only with undergraduate students who are mod-
erately homogenous. Theoretically, the approach is transferable to graduate
students and to multinational or transnational business practitioners. Content
would follow the same stages (paradigmatically familiar, provocative, antici-
patory) but could easily vary by situation.
The homogeneity in my students helps to foster psychological safety
among them; still, I insist that we cocreate ground rules during the first
sessions and that students actively hold each other accountable for the
ground rules. A paradigmatically more diverse group might require added
attention in the early stages of the group’s life.
The approach is rewarding and risky. Life-long learning and innovation
abilities emerge where curiosity and affirmation exist. Therefore, a teacher
creates lasting change by cultivating that curiosity and by demonstrating
paradigmatic shifts toward principles of appreciative inquiry. In fact, the
very act of engaging myself in writing this article has itself created change
by cultivating my curiosity about what I choose to do and by refining my
own awareness of underlying assumptions about education that I hold dear.
My hope is that students themselves will experience this article and my
participant-observer stance as an example of how they too might continu-
ously build meaning out of their experiences.

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