Co Operative Inquiry

Combinatorial inquiry is an emerging method for developing shared understanding of complex systems. The method leverages mathematical principles to propose participatory research strategies for systems of topics. Using the people-process-content-technology system as the basis for the combinatorial inquiry, this leads to proposing three inquiries, collaborating with the organization development, usability, and knowledge management communities, respectively. Future directions include constructing combinatorial inquiry as a theory, federating the conference papers with respect to journalism, and a proposal for inquiring into collective action as the paper for October 2012.

Background: The goal of social integration is part of the ideological motivation behind the transition from institutionalised to decentralised psychiatric care. Modern community mental health care considers social integration vital for improving mental health. However, reports suggest that efforts to socially integrate people who suffer from mental health problems have not been as successful as anticipated. Aim: The overall aim of the study was to achieve a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of social integration of people with mental health problems in the community. An additional aim was to develop the healthcare professionals' insight into this phenomenon by means of cooperative inquiry. The specific research questions were: How have people with mental health problems affected their neighbourhood after re-establishing in the community? How do people with mental health problems experience social integration in the community? How does knowledge of social integration promote practical changes in mental health professionals' practice? Methods: This study, which comprises four papers, has a hermeneutic design. The data collection methods took the form of interviews with 19 neighbours of group homes for people with mental health problems (Paper I) and focus groups in two separate studies of people with mental health problems, one of which comprised 12 participants in three groups (Paper II) and the other 17 participants in three different multistage focus groups (Paper III), i.e. a total of 14 focus groups. Paper IV utilises findings from Papers I-III by means of a cooperative approach. There were two areas of knowledge development in the research process: dialogue-based teaching and focus groups. The main emphasis of the dialoguebased teaching was to facilitate the articulation of practical and tacit knowledge. Twenty-two healthcare professionals and social workers participated in two different multistage focus groups, a total of 6 focus groups (Paper IV). Data-analysis methods included both the constant comparative process and qualitative content analysis. Findings: The first paper begins with the experiences of neighbours of people who suffer from mental health problems. The neighbours reported frightening behaviours as well as complications in their contact with people who had long-term mental health problems, which led to increased insecurity and fear. The reaction of the neighbourhood was exclusion and segregation in the form of distancing or watching. The next two papers employed a user perspective and revealed that, when meeting people, the participants experienced shame and fear of exclusion due to lack of acceptance and loss of autonomy. Integrity proved a necessary quality for the possibility to be treated as an equal. Lack of work or a meaningful occupation and a low income contributed to a sense of worthlessness and loneliness. Those who had a job or took part in club activities seemed to achieve social companionship, which gave them a sense of being more socially integrated. The cooperative research project enabled co-researchers to gain increased professional knowledge and awareness, as well as providing potential for improvements in clinical practice. Systematic reflection on practice leads to an increased awareness of one's own attitudes and intervention methods, societal conditions and the community's attitude to the increased social integration of people with mental health problems. The experiential knowledge gained may contribute to health-promotion strategies such as social integration. Conclusions: Integration difficulties are experienced by both individuals with mental health problems and their neighbouring community. In order to achieve social integration, a person with long-term mental health problems needs to develop adequate social competence. Those working in community mental health care must ensure that people suffering from mental health problems experience a sense of belonging in the community, which can enable them to develop a network and achieve social integration in the planning and development of daytime activities and work, thus promoting social integration. The neighbourhood requires, at the very least, general information when a group home is established. Cooperative inquiry can be beneficial in the public sector, although in order to achieve the best possible result, the whole team must be involved and play an active role in all areas of the research project. If the groups are too large, the participants' level of engagement may suffer. Multistage focus groups proved to be a powerful method for knowledge acquisition and should be further developed as a means of expanding new knowledge.

A cooperative inquiry was established to explore the experience of a panpsychic world of sentient beings rather than inert objects, a world in which mind-sentience, subjectivity, and the will of self-realization-is a fundamental aspect of matter, just as matter is a fundamental aspect of mind. The nature of worldviews, the fundamental basis of our perceiving, thinking, valuing, and acting, is addressed and a brief outline of living cosmos panpsychism offered. The inquiry asks, could we humans, through intentional engagement, relate to the rivers as beings, subjects, or other-than-human persons in their own right? How might we engage with the rivers through personal relationship, ceremony, and invocation? What are the possibilities for reciprocal communication? In short, how might rivers speak? K E Y W O R D S cooperative inquiry, experiential inquiry, living cosmos panpsychism, ontopoetics, Panpsychism, worldviews After 2 weeks away, Andrea spends an afternoon visiting her local river, the Little Campbell-or as she has learned to call her, Tah-la-lu-in British Columbia, Canada. She sings to River as she walks, noticing how time seems to have slowed and, despite her excitement, slows her own pace to match. River lies beyond the train tracks; crossing them now, she feels far from daily life, as if the tracks represent passage into a different world, a liminal place both here and not here. Picking her way along the fence edging the beach and the rising tide, she turns a corner and, on seeing Tahla-lu, feels a surge of joy. At that moment, and without warning, a flock of geese fly in from behind her, landing with honks and splashes on the calm surface of the river. Startled at first by this unexpected and noisy arrival, she begins to laugh with delight. This sudden appearance feels heraldic, ceremonial. Andrea feels both included in the noisy action of the geese and honoured by it. She is overcome by a powerful sense of being both loved and in

The global polycrisis, particularly ecological degradation and humans' estrangement from nature, is an epistemological crisis that has been created by an industrial, mechanistic and reductionist way of knowledge creation. As our knowing informs our way of being and acting in the world, this study attempts to answer the call for urgent educational reform in promoting a critical complexity approach to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Using the South African Life Sciences curriculum and a theoretical framework developed through literature on complexity theory, systems theory, ecoliteracy and ESD, a teaching and learning experience entitled the Working with Nature (WWN) project was developed. Six diversely different secondary schools from the Western Cape of South Africa participated in this project which through participatory action research (PAR), explored the effect that it had on the thinking, values and knowledge of both teachers and learners. From a thematic analysis on the emergent narratives, it was found that that the learning experience did promote integrative thinking and value tendencies and that there was growth in both the explicit-formal and explicit-informal knowledge typologies of the participants. Other key themes that emerged from the experience were diversity values, grit and resilience and contextual thinking. Themes that emerged that were more teacher specific were around process rather than product learning and learner-centeredness. The implications of this research are vast, however mainly suggest that mainstreaming a critical complexity learning experience is possible and that perhaps this may be the start of a transitioning towards a "new moment" in Life Sciences education, which translates not only into ESD, but also a complexity ethic-creating mindful teachers and learners who engage and participate in the world sustainably. Further studies are necessary in developing strategies for reform and transformation within all education levels towards effectively implementing ESD. Stellenbosch University https://scholar.sun.ac.za First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Eve Annecke, for your mindful and gentle guidance throughout my journey. Conversations with you were therapeutic for my mind and soul. To Robin Murray, my co-supervisor and hands-on supporter, thank you for our numerous meetings and discussions. You prepared me thoroughly for all the technical hurdles that I had to overcome and provided me with thorough critique during this process. My editor and colleague Nella Freund. I am in huge gratitude to you for all the support, time and conscientious reading and editing you have done for this thesis. Thank you with all my heart. To my support structures-family, friends, Bishops Diocesan College, the Bishops Biology Department, my colleagues. So much of what I am about and what emerged from this paper was due to your involvement, care and love. To the incredible learners and teachers from the six schools who were involved in this project. Thank you for allowing yourselves and your voices to be brought into this journey. Gratitude must be given to Lindie Buirski from the City of Cape Town's Environmental Resource Management department and Teaching Biology Project for making the workshops possible. To the Sustainability Institute, Beatrix, Jess and Shima. My personal transformation over the past three years is owed to you all. Thank you for opening up my eyes, mind, hands and heart to the interconnectedness of life and the beauty and necessity of the mess. I need to pay special acknowledgement to my colleague, co-facilitator and friend Cheryl Douglas. Your love and passion for education in its entirety is always inspiring. Thank you for always being there to hear out my philosophical waffle and making everything seem possible. This thesis is dedicated to you for your lifelong contribution to the thousands of teachers and learners who you have guided. To the Earth, for being the most valuable classroom and teacher that there is.

Co-operative inquiry is a way of working with other people who have similar concerns and interests to yourself, in order to: • Understand your world, make sense of your life and develop new and creative ways of looking at things. • Learn how to act to change things you may want to change and find out how to do things betterii. Research is usually thought of as something done by people in universities and research institutes. There is a researcher who has all the ideas, and who then studies other people by observing them, asking them questions, or by designing experiments. The trouble with this kind of way of doing research is that there is often very little connection between the researcher's thinking and the concerns and experiences of the people who are actually involved. People are treated as passive subjects rather than as active agents. We believe that good research is research conducted with people rather than on people. We believe that ordinary people are quite capable o...

In response to the tendency for music to be under-represented in the discourse of medical humanities, we framed the question 'how can music heal?' We answered it by exploring the lived experiences of musicians with lay or professional interests in health. Two medical students and a medically qualified educationalist, all musicians, conducted a cooperative inquiry with a professional musician interested in health. All researchers and six respondents kept audio or written diaries. Three respondents were interviewed in depth. A medical school head (and experienced musician) critiqued the phenomenological analysis of respondents' accounts of music, health, and its relationship with undergraduate medical education. Respondents experienced music as promoting health, even in seriously diseased people. Music affected people's identity and emotions. Through the medium of structure and harmony, it provided a means of self-expression that adapted to whatever condition people were in. Music was a communication medium, which could make people feel less isolated. Immersion in music could change negative states of mind to more positive ones. A transport metaphor was commonly used; music 'taking people to better places'. Exercising control by becoming physically involved in music enhanced diseased people's self-esteem. Music was able to bring the spiritual, mental, and physical elements of their lives into balance, to the benefit of their wellbeing. Music could help medical students appreciate holistically that the state of health of people who are either well or diseased can be enhanced by a 'non-technical' intervention.

Combinatorial inquiry is an emerging method for developing shared understanding of complex systems. The method leverages mathematical principles to propose participatory research strategies for systems of topics. Using the people-process-content-technology system as the basis for the combinatorial inquiry, this leads to proposing three inquiries, collaborating with the organization development, usability, and knowledge management communities, respectively. Future directions include constructing combinatorial inquiry as a theory, federating the conference papers with respect to journalism, and a proposal for inquiring into collective action as the paper for October 2012.

I, Gideon Stephanus Cloete, declare that the entire body of work contained in this dissertation is my own, original work; that I am the sole author thereof (save to the extent explicitly otherwise stated), that reproduction and publication thereof by Stellenbosch University will not infringe any third party rights and that I have not previously in its entirety or in part submitted it for obtaining any qualification.

This is a Master's degree practicum using Co-operative Inquiry for the first time formally. The project was a bust, and I was less than artful in my facilitation, and it is valuable for all that it covers for others interested in co-operative inquiry. It does reveal the co-inquirers, and as they are still friends and it did get messy, I hope I can be forgiven. All in all a very intimate paper.

NOTE: This is a failed project which is normal in academics. READ John Heron's Cooperative Inquiry here or elsewhere to learn how to do it well.

This is an update to an older paper created for an MA in Transformative Learning and Change at the CA Institute of Integral Studies. It is meant to be an offering, an easy jumpstart, and checklist to a research method that can overwhelm. It has taken me years to begin to have the experience of one that I believe has worked out beautiful upon reflection. We did not intend Co-operative Inquiry but I find myself easily able to appreciate our research as highly fitting, that intends a revolutionary book.