Enabling Communities to Practice the Best in Early Childhood Development: Using Appreciative Inquiry in ECD

Abstract

This paper focusses on the use of appreciative inquiry (AI) to change a community's approach to issues related to early childhood development (ECD). "The appreciative approach recognises that there are very different ways of viewing the world. It asks us to look at the way we see the world - before we look at the world at all...Appreciative inquiry starts from the assumption that villagers already care and know a lot about their children's early years. It does not pretend that things cannot be improved but it seeks to identify and respect what communities are already doing; what coping strategies they have developed; what child rearing practices they value and why; what roles different groups in the community play with respect to child rearing; what adaptations to established patterns communities regard as acceptable and what adaptations they regard as unacceptable. In other words, an appreciative approach tries to see child rearing from the perspective of the villager; to validate what is good in motivation or effect; to help communities make more general their own best practices..."

As the paper details, AI involves the following four components:

• Discovery: asking specific questions about ECD to community members in order to learn about the community's achievements, sources of pride, coping strategies, traditions, and best practices in this area.
• Dreaming: helping community members recognise their commitments and formulate plans for the future by constructing a limited number of "stretch statements", 4 to 6 declarations like the following: "This community takes pleasure in providing the needs of all our children, including those suffering with HIV."
• Design: planning to address questions like "who is going to do what? by when? accountable to whom? with what resources? provided by whom? to achieve exactly what?"
• Delivery: work on the part of the facilitator to ensure that the most important stories are being remembered, the delivery process is inclusive, the coping mechanisms of the community are healthy (rather than focussed on blaming) when plans must be reevaluated, and that the community feels a sense of pride in its own efforts to help itself.

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