Donna Frost

Design and methods 89 4 group in the lifetime of that particular group. The green, orange and yellow spirals show how repeated cycling occurred within the larger inquiry cycle: inquiry questions were generated within the group meetings and then investigated in the individual practice worlds of the individual group members, resulting in data that were then brought back into the group for collective consideration and interpretation. The collaborative process during meetings led to new insights and new questions, incrementally furthering understandings of professional artistry and thereby moving the overall inquiry forward. Although there are three vertical spirals shown in Figure 4 . 2 , in practice the process repeated itself until the CCCI members were satisfied with the degree of insight and answers found to the overall inquiry question (represented by the brown spiral), in this case: what is the nature of professional artistry in our practice and how can it be facilitated? ShapingtheCCCI design: taking inspirationfromthe literature Cycles within cycles and an iterative process of individual and collective reflection on and interpretation of individually and collectively generated data are not unique to this research or the CCCI design. Rather they are the overarching principles of a variety of collaborative forms of inquiry into the human experience (eg. Reason & Rowan, 1981 ; Guba & Lincoln, 1989 ; Heron & Reason, 2001 ; Reason & Bradbury, 2001 , 2008 ; Chandler & Torbert, 2003 ; Titchen & Manley, 2007 ). Underlying these methodologies is a critiqueand rejectionof anattachment toobjectivityanddistance within social science research (Rowan & Reason, 1981 ; Heron, 1981 , 1986 ; Higgs, Titchen, Horsfall, & Armstrong, 2007 ). It is argued that valid knowledge about the human condition can most usefully and responsibly be generated in co-operation with the people it concerns, in ways that fully recognise their self-determination as people (Heron, 1985 ), the ‘interdependence of propositional, practical and experiential knowledge’ (Heron, 1996 , p. 5 ) and our generative, creative human capacity for the sacred, meaning making, engagement and developing wisdom (Reason, 1993 ; Heron, 2001 ). Heron ( 1996 , 2001 ) and Heron and Reason ( 2001 , 2008 ) bring these assumptions together within the research approach termed ‘co- operative inquiry’. They summarise co-operative inquiry as ‘research “with” rather than “on” people’ (Heron & Reason, 2001 , p. 177 ) and as involving ‘two or more people researching a topic through their own experience of it, using a series of cycles in which they move between their experience and reflecting together on it’ (Heron, 1996 , p. 1 ).