Appreciative Inquiry for Inclusive Schools: Preliminary Results from a Scoping Review on Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)

Inclusion is widely recognized as one of the founding principles for the quality of educational institutions and it is strictly related to the ICF perspective. Actually, the conceptualization of educational needs is associated to the enhancement of everyone’s strengths and potential, and to the influence the (physical and social) environment may have. For these reasons schools should pay attention on these factors and on what is positive to lead to transformative and generative processes that may promote inclusion. In this sense, a useful framework may be that of the Appreciative Inquiry as it is strength-based process through which people act in partnership to determine and co-create how to move an organization forward. Based on this premises, this contribution aims at exploring existing literature on the adoption of this strength-based approach in the inclusive educational field and presenting preliminary results of a Scoping review. The PRISMA-ScR checklist will be used to report the review and five databases and global search engines. As a final point, this preliminary investigation will pay special attention to the adoption of the Appreciative Inquiry to encourage full participation and learning process of students who use Virtual Learning Environment at school. Results show that only few studies adopt the AI in this specific educational field, but an interesting investigation propose the adaptation of the Appreciative Learning. Hence, more studies should be done to make clear how this process may support inclusive process.