Donna Frost

Chapter 8 262 A parallel process was happening throughout the inquiry and later, during preparation of the thesis, in my supervision relationship with Angie and Brendan. As I struggled with the paradoxical nature of both professional artistry and my own journey as a facilitator and writer, Angie and Brendan enacted the principles of critical creativity, enabling me to look honestly at where I was, learn to embrace the turbulence as a source of energy and unfold the strength and courage to create and move into newways of doing and becoming. The CCCI process: an operationalisation of critical creativity This investigation generally and the CCCI lemniscate specifically have proven an effective operationalisation of critical creativity. Following the CCCI process helped ensure that the principles of critical creativty were enacted and built into the investigation so that our understanding of them developed through our experience of enacting them. It wasn’t necessary to understand the principles thoroughly cognitively before we began or that we all would be individually able to articulate the theoretical underpinnings. The CCCI process enabled us to begin where we were, to ‘walk’ and enact the principles so that they could ‘do their work’ in helping us come to understand our professional artistry, as explained in the previous section. The process was, as well, sufficiently open and flexible to accommodate and utilize unexpected situations. There was room to experience both congruence and dissonance, dissonance being particularly necessary if a collaborative inquiry process is to be rigorous (Heron, 1985 ). This inquiry work asked from us as inquirers a willingness to embrace the turbulence, discover circles of connection and work with a variety of energising forces that none of us had habitually paid attention to before the inquiry. This work ‘asked’ from the design that the principles for coping with turbulence and perhaps even crises be incorporated into the methodology and methods and that by following the phases of the lemniscate we would automatically, for example, be creating circles of connection. The CCCI design met these demands. Two aspects will be explored here: the potential of the CCCI design for enabling embodied investigation of embodied praxis, and the potential of the CCCI design for enabling ethical, inclusive and particularised collaborative inquiry in the midst of practice. Embodied investigation of embodied praxis The reality of this research was different from my original plans for the inquiry. I had intended to first uncover and explicate the nature of professional artistry and then to investigate how it could be facilitated. In reality, the two processes went