Donna Frost

Chapter 5 152 My journey as researcher: facilitating the investigation and developing professional artistry My own journey within this research was to a great extent concerned with learning to embody the principles of critical creativity. By this I mean, not just applying them cognitively and when I had had the chance to think about it beforehand, but becoming able to work in these ways more often and more naturally, so that such ways of being and doing became an integral part of my research practice and, in the end, my research praxis. Before examining that part of my journey in more depth I will address a challenge that was, at least in the beginning stages of the research, more immediate, and also with the potential to impact on the rigour of the research: working in two languages. Working in two languages English ismyfirst language. I have lived in theNetherlands since 2004 and have been fluent in both written and spoken Dutch since at least 2007 , perhaps earlier than that. Generating data and facilitating and participating in collaborative processes of meaning making in Dutch posed, therefore, no problem. Furthermore, my having English as a first language was seen by inquiry participants as an advantage when we were discussing ideas from the literature. The challenges I experienced lay in two other areas. Firstly, my field notes and reflections were often written in a mix of Dutch, English and elements of shorthand. Writing quickly in this blended fashion was not something I could ‘turn off’ when immersed in practice observations or taking notes during meetings. I ended up adding extra notes or translations where necessary after the fact. The example in Figure 5 . 5 shows the mixing of Dutch, English and shorthand together on the first page ( 3 b), and on the second page ( 4 b) the translation from Dutch to English of the remarks made during the meeting evaluation. In this case I wanted to share the evaluation data with English speakers. Sometimes parts of these kind of notes had to be added to or translated into Dutch, so that the notes could be entered into the collaborative record within the RNI or NPI.