Breakout: Curious for the Full(er) Story? Inquiry, Impact, Measurement and Method
In this session we learn how cultivating conscious curiosity is core to understanding what matters in our communities. By applying Community of Inquiry (CoI) theory and practices, we can culture sustainable evaluation and service assessment with colleagues and stakeholders in participatory ways that are meaningful, efficient, and build social capital partnerships. Taking a playful studio approach, we will apply CoI to sandbox sample community and library data to identify core questions, identify gaps, and introduce how to develop an experimental mindset to “rapid prototype” targeted methods that can help to tell—and hear—the fuller story.
Learning objectives:
- How to identify when we have a “knowledge gap” in available data
- How to identify “data in plain sight” (e.g., stories as data; lived experiences of staff and community members; tacit information behaviors, etc.)
- How to apply CoI to focus on what locally matters to inform usable impact measurement
- Introduce a menu of participatory, practice-tested qualitative methods to culture a local evaluation and assessment community of practice (CoP) as healthy community knowledge ecosystem.