Soooo to my inquiry....

Sooooo to my inquiry.  First things first what am I trying to achieve?

• Take ownership of my critical thinking process.
• Create questions that make me look at my practice.
• Identify issues from my professional context that are important to me.
• Find an inquiry that can clarify and provide solutions.
• Find an inquiry that sustains successful practice or defines more personal issues.

In order to take ownership of my critical thinking process I think it is important to look back on what I want to gain from my inquiry.  By understanding where I am coming from in asking certain questions I can ascertain the goal I am trying to achieve and in turn develop an inquiry that is important, relevant and useful.

I started by looking at the importance of the what? and why? surrounding question asking. Here is a link to that particular blog:
 
What is a question? Why do we ask certain questions?

In breaking down my thinking to it's simplest form in this way it allowed me to gain insight and understand that I needed to get my head around what I want to gain from my inquiry before I start throwing out questions that bear no relevance to my current or future practice.  This is something I feel I can begin to clarify further now.

So I began to analyse what I wanted to gain from my question: 

Pyschology lesson in campus session

Back to the reader

Inspire....

In summary of these three blogs the following comments stood out and still ring true:

•  I want to make a difference.
• Desire to do more with my skills.
• What can I do? How can I get involved?
• I want to gain knowledge on my subject area coupling it with my experience and current practice.

I took my original questions to my colleagues, friends and fellow bappers developing them in content and clarity:
 
What Erica thought

What Tara thought

What they thought

From doing this the main points I gained were:

• Be more specific.
• Chose one line of inquiry don't try and cover too much.
• Importance of choosing a subject I am really interested in but not seeing it as a career choice.

The conclusion I came to in terms of my question was this:

May have hit my idea.....maybe

What is the social drive behind inclusive theatre?

In reflection I have decided that I do not want to narrow my inquiry to that of just inclusive theatre and I want to make it more applicable to my current practice.  With my recurring theme of the desire to inspire I want the focus to be on theatre for children and young people.  Also looking at what has inspired me recently and the career path I now want to go down focusing on just inclusive theatre would limit me.  I want to work within community, outreach and young people so this is where I want my question to lie.  I want to be able to use the resources I do have not just new ones.  There is lots of I wants in this paragraph but now I need to formulate it into a question.  I may have decided not to follow this line of inquiry but still believe the steps I took to get there have further my development and thinking.

To quote myself 'I want to gain knowledge about a new field, I want to understand what is going on out there and where it has stemmed from, I want to know how I can get involved.  This doesn't mean I am ignoring what I currently do and enjoy I am simply adding to it.'  This is still the key factor as I move forward.

Hollie xx