Donna Frost

The critical creative collaborative inquiries in action 145 5 Creativity within inquiry meetings The setting off point, in the first NPI CCCI meeting, was to share with each other our initial understandings of the concept of professional artistry and to explore when professional artistry might be present in our nursing or facilitation practice. Prior to this meeting the NPI members had been reflecting on their expertise as practitioners and had been collecting feedback from patients, colleagues or both, as summarised in the first row of Table 5 . 6 . As well, the topic of the inquiry was known to everyone. Cognitively, therefore, each person had been thinking about the idea of professional artistry for some time. This meeting was the first occasion that the NPs had used creative methods to surface other ways of knowing. The sphere was positive and the group was curious as to what the experience would bring; no one expressed any reservations about working in this way (Donna-RJ 20121008 - Vol 5 p 41 ). I had set out a selection of objects and creative materials in the room, and each person took time, in silence, to choose or create something to represent his or her understandings of professional artistry at that time. After time for reflection, each person shared their image or chosen object and put into words what the creative expression represented. The two figures on the following page form a compilation of these initial understandings of professional artistry. The first, Figure 5 . 3 , shows parts of photos of the creative expressions shared during the meeting. The second, Figure 5 . 4 , gives an impression of the words and phrases each person used when talking about the creative expression. The position of each circle in the second image corresponds with the first, so that Margaret’s painting of the flower in the left upper circle in Figure 5 . 3 is associated with Margaret’s words, in the left upper circle of Figure 5 . 4 , and so on. Figure 5 . 3 Initial understandings of professional artistry, NPI-Mtg 1 -Mulitple photos, edited here to form one image