Donna Frost

Discussion and conclusions 267 8 creative ways of knowing and an inclusive epistemology are also demonstrated, throughout this thesis, by incorporation of creative expressions and creative writing within the presentation of the results and reflection on the findings. The ways we communicated and worked with our questions, insights and understandings within the CCCI groups have become, in this respect, transferable to audiences outside the inquiry. My experience of the inquiry process as iterative and collaborative was, initially, not so strongly shared by the members of the RNI. I was ‘carrying’ the intended process, for example the CCCI lemniscate, in my head, and was not well able to articulate it at the start of the inquiry. That needn’t have been an obstacle: as I have argued earlier in this chapter, it can be more helpful, in fact, to experience the inquiry process and then explore and elucidate the experience together, rather than first having everything ‘explained’. My ability to support others in exploring the experience and explicating the process collaboratively was, however, limited, at the beginning of the inquiry. My periodic retreat to a rational explanation did not surprise the inquiry members: it fitted well with their perception of an ‘external’ expert who came to tell them how they should do things. Initially, too, I shared my learning as a facilitator only with my supervisors and with other doctoral students also engaged in critical and creative methodologies. I hid it from the RNI members. Unconsciously I was indeed presenting myself within the RNI as an expert: certainly an expert nurse and to some extent an experienced facilitator. During the course of the RNI my approach shifted. This shift was enabled and even engendered by the steps of the CCCI process. Participating in the presentations of reflection and learning at the beginning of each meeting, and participating in the creative response and critical dialogue after practice observations, for example, meant that my ‘othered’ role could not be maintained. My own learning and my inquiry into my own professional artistry were shared with fellow inquiry members so that I was no longer merely talking about authentic engagement, I was engaging authentically. I was no longer talking about learning from experience, I was learning from experience. Collaborative exploration of my facilitation practice, in the same way as we explored the inquiry members’ nursing practice, opened my eyes to my way of being as a facilitator at the beginning of the RNI and how my facilitation practice was becoming changed as an outcome of the inquiry process. This is a particular strength of the CCCI design and the lemniscate investigative cycle. It enabled meeting many of the challenges presented by the methodological principles: realising investigative collaboration, for example, with our unique motivations and starting points; learning to identify and be explicit about the