Donna Frost

The critical creative collaborative inquiries in action 151 5 Several practice inquiry episodes were undertaken, therefore, without engaging in the creative response. In hindsight, both the practitioner-inquirer and the observer- inquirer ran into difficulties when doing this, and noted problems when in dialogue with each other. Missing out the creativity made it difficult to get quickly to the essence of the encounter. As well, it was much more challenging to articulate the more nebulous aspects of the encounter, as Anna explains. Although it seemed like a good idea to skip the cards and the painting etc, I really missed it in the end. I couldn’t seem to get away from describing what I had seen, what I had done, what I was thinking. […] And your [Pieter’s] feedback for me was also about that kind of thing. ‘I heard you say…’ ‘And then you did …’. When we work creatively we end up talking about what we feel and sense, what the unspoken things are. I was disappointed in the end. […] It is a challenge. I wonder what my boss will think if he walks past and sees me with crayons! (Anna-CRC- 20130823 -p 12 ) How to overcome this challenge was thoroughly discussed in the third CCCI meeting. We paid attention to the underlying principles of working both creatively and cognitively and practised being able to articulate our reasons in a couple of sentences so that wewould be able to explain to colleagues what our reasons were. We tackled the practical aspects as well, agreeing that working with association cards and coloured pencils would generally be easy to arrange in the middle of work, and would give us enough freedom to engage our creativity. It became a shared goal, to help each other incorporate this step when observing each other in practice, and it laid the groundwork for learning to facilitate each other in working consciously with the body. Overcoming this obstacle as a group was an example of reflexive research practice and coping with aspects of the research that did not go as planned. It illustrated for us the link between our principles and ways of working, and made obvious, at the same time, that knowing something works is not necessarily sufficient to be able to put it into practice. Both insight and useful practical tools, such as determining a strategy beforehand, were needed when trying to enact our principles in practice situations.