Activity:

Conducting your Generative Knowledge Interview (GKI)

Adapted from Melissa R. Peet’s The Integrative Knowledge Portfolio Process: Identify Your Capacities, Discover Your Purpose, Demonstrate Your Difference with modifications for College Unbound.

During your GKI:

1. Each person will take turns being the speaker and the interviewer/note-taker. Each speaker should share all three of their stories before you ask follow up questions. Plan on giving each speaker about 20 minutes to tell their stories, followed by questions and clarification.
2. If you are the speaker, use the ideas you gathered in preparing for your GKI to help you tell the story of each of these experiences.
3. If you are the interviewer and/or listener, listen for repetition: What words, ideas, actions, kinds of decisions, ways of learning seem to come up more than once? write down words and phrases that will help you remember these and any other insights later.
4. If you are the interviewer, start by asking the speaker to tell you the story of their first experience and then go on to the next two.
5. Wait to ask follow-up questions: Let the speaker get through their stories before you start asking questions. The goal is to give them time to see where their thoughts take them before you start probing. Follow up questions should help the speaker further detail their story:
   • Ask embodied questions to help the speaker show not tell: Prompt them to describe what they were doing in a way that gives you a mental picture. Can you see, hear, smell, and touch (possibly even taste) the experience they are describing? If not, ask for detail until you can.
   • Ask what, why and how questions: What was that like? How did you go about doing that? Why did you decide to do x instead of y?
   • Help the speaker tell a story: Think of each experience as a story with the following components:
     • A beginning: the context; the people involved; the speaker’s role; what the speaker was trying to accomplish
     • A middle: What happened and why? Ask for examples of how the speaker responded to the frustrations, challenges, and “ah ha” moments along the way
     • The end: What happened as a result of what the speaker did or did not do? What did they learn from the experience then and now?
   • Help the speaker “unpack” their language to get to the detail hiding behind common words and phrases: Push the speaker to say what they mean when they use common words and phrases like “interesting,” “surprised,” “frustrated,” or “I organized.” Ask what was so interesting, what made them surprised and why, how they were frustrated and what they did to organize something.
6. Check your understanding: Reflect back to the speaker what you hear them saying after the speaker has had a chance to tell their stories.
7. Identify core strengths evident across the stories: After listening to all three of the speaker’s stories and asking your unpacking and clarifying questions, identify for the speaker the strengths and/or capacities you heard across their stories.

Tips for Generative Knowledge Interviewing

• Do not be empathetic: It sounds harsh, but it actually will help you be a better listener. Rather than looking for points of commonality with the speaker and being tempted to tell your own story of a similar experience, focus on learning what makes your partner’s story unique. In other words, when you are tempted to say, “I know what you mean . . .” probe instead to find out what they mean.
• Practice radical curiosity: Assume that you truly do not know anything about the speaker and that you are eager to learn about their experience.
• Listen for repetition: What words, ideas, actions, kinds of decisions, ways of learning seem to come up more than once? write down words and phrases that will help you remember these and any other insights later.
• Most importantly, relax: After you have read through these directions and tips, put them aside and be your naturally curious self.

And now, without further ado, begin the GKIs!

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