My first-person inquiry is into my professional practice and my development as a practitioner. It is an inductive inquiry, from which I draw universal conclusions from my unique reflections on my sense-of-self and my experiences of my practice. Through practising-as-inquiry I interpret, discover and make the value, benefits and impact of my practice to me and others, and thereby resource and harvest the ethos, praxis and autopoiesis with which I further develop my capacity to intervene in my own and my clients’ systems.
My inquiry considers how I have worked with my data as a bricolage of action research approaches to practising-as-inquiry and their congruence with my philosophy and its actionable knowledge. The form of the bricolage has also been reflected in the practice data I have chosen to present – an inquiry in collaboration with 15 others into our association in common, a heuristic inquiry into relationships in my families of origin and procreation as containers of personal transformation and flourishing, and a facilitated inquiry into my capacity to intervene and scaffold the development of my clients within their own systems.
The bricolage is also apparent in the pragmatic use of whatever practices and tools – constellations, conversations, create-and curate processes, ethnodrama, fridge-magnet poetry, iPhone videos, iterative writing, origami fortune-tellers, photographs, reflective practice, relational supervision, self-dialogue, storytelling – were immediately to hand for the improvisation of my experiments in the moment, as well as in the qualitative research methods – autoethnography, grounded theory, reflections-in- and -on-action, self-dialogue, storytelling – that I have used to interpret my experiences and make my world more visible in this inquiry.
The pragmatic usefulness of this inquiry is in working towards transformation through practising-as-inquiry and developing self-as-practitioner. It is this self-made quality of practice as the outcome of practising that is my unique, universal contribution
