Participatory Community Inquiry in the Opioid Epidemic by Craig T. Maier

Author:Craig T. Maier [Maier, Craig T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781000515862
Google: aZ1IEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-10-19T01:02:03+00:00

Action-Oriented

Kemmis, McTaggart, and Nixon (2014) argue that people engaged in action-oriented inquiry must also know how to situate the practices they design as a part of a broader program of systematic change, what Arnett, Fritz, and McManus (2018) describe as a story that offers people a reason why practices matter. Writing on the German political thinker Hannah Arendt (1998), Arnett (2013) suggests that these stories emerge from actions that respond to the challenges the community faces and hold the potential of marking a new beginning in the community’s life together. But action is a moment of great risk, as well as an occasion of potential rebirth. As Arendt remarks, the true results of an action are always invisible to those engaged in it. We do not know if we will succeed or fail, or if our good intentions will have unwelcome consequences. Where PCI’s appreciative intent focuses on positive problem-solving, and where the process of practice-making encourages people to reflect and make changes in their everyday lives as individuals, action is a risk that the inertia of life all too often discourages people from taking. But action is essential for community vitality. If a community is a conversation about a story that matters, actions mark turning points in that conversation where a community’s story can be reinterpreted, retold, or renewed. Without action, the conversation falters, the story grows cold, and the community withers.

Also drawing from Arendt, Argyris (1993) describes how taking action is vital for group learning and growth. Action, he argues, is much more than implementing a plan. Bringing what they know (or think they know) into conversation with what they are doing, action allows community members to test their assumptions about the social goods that sustain their community and the practices that nourish those goods. Trying, failing, and trying again exposes gaps in thinking and knowledge, brings new issues to light, and reveals the resources members need to develop if they are to move forward. Similarly, Kemmis and his colleagues (2014) frame action research as inherently reflective, occurring in an iterative spiral of planning change, acting out the plan and observing the results of that change, reflecting on those results, and re-planning based on that learning, which in turn begins a new cycle of action, observation, and reflection. In this sense, both Argyris and Kemmis and his co-authors underscore an essential point that Arendt (1998) believes that contemporary society has forgotten: Action and reflection are not opposed but must work together and inform each other. They meet through the act of storytelling that embeds what we do in larger plots that give our experience texture and meaning. In this sense, we can see Kemmis, McTaggart, and Nixon’s (2014) action research framework itself as an unending story of planning, experimentation, learning, and growth.

In action, then, PCI completes the circle, returning to the stories that give rise to both the community and the goods that define its life together. Depending on the approach that we are taking, we can frame

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