Strategic Questioning, Appreciate Enquiry & Dialogue

In my project plan, I have adopted Peavey’s strategic questioning concept.  There are two levels in the strategic questioning process.  The first level questions describe the issue from its symptoms to its relationship with society and our daily lives, while the second level questions dig deeper to create the optimal strategy and action (Peavey 1997).  Strategic questioning stirs up the mind, challenges the dominant values, and creates motion to think deeper and move forward to find solution.  It creates options and empowers people. Strategic questioning is a critical approach to create sustainable personal and social change.


Besides strategic questioning, my project plan also employs appreciate enquiry and dialogue approaches to hear the voice of the youths. Appreciate enquiry values differences and relationship by using affirmative languages for questioning.  It helps people to connect one another and creates a harmony environment.  It is a method I learned in an non-violence community workshop last year. 

Dialogue is a two-way conservation between equals (Bohm et.al 1991 cited in Smith2001:7) towards building shared understanding, meaning and creating action (Westoby and Dowling 2009:10).  In a genuine dialogue, when ‘I’ hold my agenda and pre-judgments and open myself to your world and listen to ‘your’ stories and respond to ‘You’, the issues are not yours but ours and ‘We’ can build a common ground to work together (Burber 1947 cited in Westoby and Dowling 2009).  This movement and responsiveness in dialogue nurture the human relationships.  By responding to key words in the dialogue that contains positive action and deconstructing the words and language structure, we can understand the key issues of people’s struggles and widen the action possibilities (ibid).

Dialogue requires practice and skills.  It is hard.  I tried several times to open dialogue with people but we are still far away to build a common ground.  One of the reasons is I am still in the process building trust with people and the community organization.  Trust is important for working together.  At this moment, I have intentionally held up my project plan slightly to establish a trusted relationship with people. 


References

Peavey, F. 1997, ‘Strategic Questioning: An approach to creating personal and social change’, www.context.org/LCLIB/IC40/Peavey.htm

Smith, MK 2001, ‘Dialogue and conversation’, The encyclopaedia of informal education, www.infed.org/bibio/b-dialog.htm

Westoby, P & Dowling G, 2009. Dialogical Community Development: with depth, solidarity and hospitality, Tafina Press, West End.