Donna Frost

The critical creative collaborative inquiries in action 161 5 to put our sensations into words. In this way opportunities are created to move between the parts and the whole and to recognise, or perhaps make, connections that were not initially noticed. Lastly, if we create stillness and time to just ‘be’ with ourselves, the salient points of our experience and the issues that need dealing with, that we are mulling over, will show themselves. I was intentionally engaging in reflective walks, alone and early in the day, but I had no preconceived ideas about what I wanted to reflect on. If anything, I expected that I would be occupied by the content of my work days while away from home. Following the steps of my reflective process created the conditions for my unconscious or pre-conscious self to introduce the nagging feeling of worry I had about how I was or was not facilitating rigorous inquiry procedures within the research. These experiences, when taken together, gave me several insights into my role as facilitator within the inquiries. At the time, group members had embraced the idea of working creatively. There was enthusiastic experimentation and fairly uncritical acceptance of the access creativity gave to otherwise hard to capture aspects of our practices and understandings. These particular cognitive and artistic reflections on my embodied experiences prompted me to pay more explicit attention to strategies for increasing rigour. As explained in Chapter 4 , it was helpful to build such strategies into the ‘ standard’ inquiry process, so that they become a regular item on our meeting agenda. Strategieswe adopted regularly included asking naïve or critical questions, by imagining, for example, that we were a sceptical colleague. In much the same way, we looked for alternative explanations to the conclusions we were developing and paid particular attention to situations in which experiences or bodily impressions contradicted each other. For example, when the observer- inquirer and the practitioner-inquirer experienced the ‘essence’ or the ‘sense’ of a practice episode differently, or when one or both of them experienced a strong emotional reaction. We also became alert to situations in which agreement was high. Were we missing something or taking something for granted? For example, we learnt to pay attention to sentences beginning with ‘of course’, ‘naturally’, or ‘obviously’ and put effort into delving deeper into the underlying assumptions. The intentional reflections on my mindful walks in the woods were the starting point which lead to initiation of these strategies.