Donna Frost

The critical creative collaborative inquiries in action 139 5 This excerpt illustrates how the use of symbolic language was often a setting off point rather than the culmination of a conversation. It was away to enter into aspects of practice that were perhaps otherwise difficult to put into words. The role of the facilitator or others in the conversation was important: asking questions, listening with curiosity and without judgement, helping the person talking to share what it is that they meant, what the metaphor, simile or analogy meant or represented to them. The above excerpt, fairly straightforward as it is, illustrates that the use of symbolic language in the co-creation of meaning is not straightforward. A metaphor, simile or other symbol sometimes evoked a very different response in the listener than the teller intended, each person attaching different meanings to the metaphor used. Curious, careful questioning of each other created room to come to mutual understanding about both the intended and unanticipated meanings, and the new meanings which evolved as part of the dialogue. Using both creative and cognitive ways of knowing It was necessary to explore the limits of a metaphor and to determine when they were no longer useful. When was an analogy like the x-factor, for example, no longer applicable to our ideas of professional artistry? What were the limits of a particular symbol? The abridged example below took place in August 2012 , during the ninth RN inquiry CCCI meeting, when we had been working together for just over a year. In it, Floortje responds creatively and cognitively to my use of a spiral to represent professional artistry (see also Figure 5 . 2 ). Figure 5 . 2 Jointly created ‘installation’, consisting of paintings, creative materials and association cards, to express our current understandings of professional artistry (RNI-Mtg 9 - Photo 017 )