A review of Lifescaping Practices in School Communities: Implementing Action Research and Appreciative Inquiry. By Rolla E. Lewis & Peg Winkelman, Routledge.
Kenneth Gergen exclaims in the Foreword, “Here Rolla Lewis, Peg Winkelman, and their associates confront the emerging condition with creative daring. They offer… a rational for new forms of action, a new range of challenging practices, and useful applications of their orientation in action…. My deepest hope is that what they share within this work can ignite a thousand fires.”
Lifescaping Practices in School Communities is an informative new resource that introduces readers to an eco-relational approach to systems change. The Participatory Inquiry Process and the 4-R Relational Wellness approaches to action research described in the text may be applied to schools, organizations, and community change efforts.
The primary audience for the text is school counselors, school administrators, parents, and other stakeholders concerned with creating schools they want to be. The text concentrates on showing how to promote relational wellness and student success in schools using action research (AR) and appreciative inquiry (AI). Besides offering theoretical grounding, and step-by-step approaches to implementing AR and AI, the text offers a number of graduate student research projects as examples of what they actually did to promote relational wellness and student success in schools.
Here is a book that will help those of you who want to change the world or just your local school. This solid and practical resource is written to help experienced and beginning action researchers move from talk to action. The authors believe that those willing to engage in a continuous lifescaping process within the communities where they work and live will be able to bring about a better world.
In collaboration with the Taos Institute, the authors have initiated the Lifescaping Project (LP) as an effort to help others take action in their schools and communities.