“Whose Inquiry is this Anyway?” Money, Power, Reports and Collaborative Inquiry

Adult educators who use collaborative/cooperative inquiry (CI) in institutional settings must be aware of potential corrupting influences from money, power and reporting requirements

Do I Really Know You? Do You Really Know Me? And, How Important Is It that We Do? Relationship and Empathy in Differing Learning Contexts

Pedagogical strategies that promote empathy foster learning by supporting meaningful dialogue. Aware that these strategies create risks as well as benefits, educators can make judgments about their potential value by examining relational power, positionality and emotional valence

How Can We Know Each Other when We are So Different? Untangling the Complexity of Diverse Life Experience and Interconnection—A Model for Navigating the Paradox of Diversity to Create Empathic Learning Space

We propose a model that describes how diversity, dialogue, emotion, and empathy interact in learning environments. The model provides guidance for addressing emotionally charged topics in highly diverse groups

Teaching and Learning for Critical Reflection on Diversity: The Need to Go Beyond the Western Perspective in a Doctoral Program in Adult Education

In an increasing inter-connected world, cultural sensitivity and leveraging diversity are critical to leadership practice. This paper examines how a cohort-based adult education doctoral program addressed diversity in teaching and learning. Including non-Western perspectives on adult learning and providing space for critical reflection equip students in a ‘global educator narrative.

Can the Arts Change the World? The Transformative Power of the Arts in Fostering and Sustaining Social Change

A group of nonprofit leaders working in the arts, advocacy, political organizing, social services, and education explored the connection between community organizing and creative expression by engaging in collective activities, including visiting various examples of community arts, and experimentation with their own practice. Through this process, the group concluded that arts could be socially transformative; that community arts can create a safe space that allows people to trust and be open to changing; that art can help people reflect together and not talk past one another; and that the process of creating together can be healing and sustaining

Looking in the mirror of inquiry: Knowledge in our students and in ourselves

At a large, urban community college located in the Northeastern United States, a group of faculty interested in helping students assume agency in their own learning used the methodology of Collaborative Inquiry (CI) as a way to examine the factors that help or hinder this process. Unexpected was the epistemological shift they underwent as a result of the CI process. The group had hoped to find ways to make students less passive, starting with the question “How do we make students into makers of knowledge?” The CI methodology, however, required the faculty to examine themselves and their own relationship with the process of knowledge-making. Through the inquiry process, which required participants to question their own assumptions, they realized that, even though they considered themselves makers of knowledge within their respective fields, they had approached this knowledge-making process quite passively. The group members thus found themselves involved in a Collaborative Inquiry process that they hadn’t initially fully understood but which required that they become active makers of knowledge. As a result, members rejected many of the assumptions implicit in the original question and began to approach the challenge of teaching and learning more actively, more respectfully, and with more humility. This article offers a narrative of this group’s process, the conclusions they reached, a set of reflections, and considerations that others using the CI process for professional development oriented inquiries may find useful

Don't Just Do Something, Sit There: Helping Others Become More Strategic, Conceptual, and Creative: A Cooperative Inquiry

How can we be more effective in helping others become more strategic, conceptual, and creative in their thinking? This group was motivated by the realization that as organizers, they could teach organizing, but were not good at getting people to think strategically. Doing cooperative inquiry gave them a space to challenge each other's assumptions about organizing, ask provocative questions and learn from one another. During their inquiry, the group started to change the way they worked in their organizations, trying new methods to engage people, such as story telling, metaphors, and other methods that allowed them to encourage participation and reflective practices. In the words of the group ""a gradual, but profound, shift occurred in our assumptions about developing leaders for our organizations."" Through their inquiry the group began to understand that the key issue is to engage others in the experience of strategic thinking. ""We realized that...in order to help people learn to be more strategic, creative, and conceptual, we would have to be intentional about being more strategic, creative, and conceptual in our relationship with them

Yorks, Lyle, Adult Learning and the Generation of New Knowledge and Meaning: Creating Liberating Spaces for Fostering Adult Learning through Practitioner-Based Collaborative Action Inquiry, Teachers College Record, 107(June, 2005), 1217-1244.

Reviews the literature on the dimensions of collaborative action inquiry in the context of adult education and reports an example from a VA project; draws implications for adult learning

Strategic human resource development

Human resource development (HRD) has emerged, in part, our of training and development that has tradisionally been rcognized as the function of everall human resource management (HRM), which has included recrutment, selection, and compensation