Creative Inquiry
By Alphonso Montuori
Introduction
My original reason for becoming an academic was because I believed inquiry was a creative and transformative process (Montuori, 2008). Most of my educational experiences unfortunately did not seem to reflect that principle. With a few exceptions, most of my education was spent in environments that viewed education as a memorization and regurgitation. When I began to explore alternative approaches to education, it soon became clear that they often simply valued the opposite of the traditional approaches. In this paper I discuss two educational models; the “Reproductive” and the “Narcissistic,” and propose an alternative I call “Creative Inquiry” (Montuori, 1989, 1998, 2003, 2005a, 2005b, 2006). In Creative Inquiry the goal is to honor the passion, creativity, and transformative process that can be a central part of inquiry. Creative Inquiry views the academic as transformative, and the transformative as grounded in the academic.
By “Reproductive” I mean an approach to education that sees the source of knowledge as almost exclusively outside the knower, and focuses almost exclusively on the accurate reproduction of that knowledge by the knower. It is about reproducing the content one has received; reproducing the disciplinary organization, instructional pedagogy, and power structures that generates this knowledge; reproducing the standard, accepted ways of conducting inquiry; reproducing the societal/industrial expectations for what a good member of the workforce is; reproducing the existing social and academic order.
Narcissistic Education emerges as an important corrective to the dry, limited view of traditional Reproductive Education. But if in the process it rejects high academic standards, if it does not involve dialogue with the larger scholarly community, if it is not grounded in the literature, if it is not open to challenge and critique, if it defies the laws of science and common sense, we end up with a narcissistic world of navel-gazing that adds little if anything of value to the field, “process” replaces “content,” and an entirely new set of oppositions is created.
Creative Inquiry is designed to integrate the best of traditional scholarly inquiry and also expand what we mean by education and inquiry by including an ongoing process of self-inquiry that recognizes the role of the knower in inquiry. Creative Inquiry in the educational process is not merely an accumulation of facts and figures, the development of an academic specialization and expertise in a given topic, but can also be an opportunity to transform oneself, one’s world, and the process of inquiry itself.
By Creative Inquiry I mean an approach that views inquiry as a creative process. Creativity offers an important entry point into alternative approaches to education for a number of other reasons. Students coming to alternative programs are looking for an opportunity, I believe, to do creative work. By this I mean that they want to do work that makes a contribution, and is not just a vermiform appendix to their advisor’s research agenda. They want to do this work in a way that is exciting, in a way that leads them to understand themselves and the world anew. They want knowledge and self-knowledge, and the opportunity to develop and express a unique viewpoint that reflects their passion and commitment. This is precisely what they feel Reproductive education denies them. Having set these lofty and admirable goals, we must now explore ways of achieving them.
A frame and three examples
In this section I will briefly discuss the role of Creative Inquiry as a frame for first-year graduate students, and then explore three classroom examples; the literature review, the development of an academic voice, and classroom interaction and collaboration.
Creative Inquiry as a frame
Key to developing the spirit of Creative Inquiry, and avoiding the pitfalls of the Reproductive/Narcissistic polarization, is to create a generative frame for inquiry in a first semester course. Creating the frame and the aspiration of Creative Inquiry can address a lot of the misconceptions about what graduate studies in alternative institutions are about. I invite students to reflect on their own educational experiences, their own assumptions about graduate education, their understanding of the role of “alternative” institutions. I ask them about whether they identify with, or aspire to become, “intellectuals,” about the relationship between scholarly research and personal growth, the academic and the transformative, about the historical developments that lead to the present condition (including America’s history of anti-intellectualism), and the possibilities that lie ahead. I attempt to make explicit most or all the issues that come before actual inquiry, but that deeply influence that process. Creative Inquiry is a frame that introduces students to a kind of thinking that connects and contextualizes rather than separating and isolating, and with that approach explore some of the historical tension that we have seen in the history of knowledge, education, and the development of alternative educational approaches. It is also a frame that taps into their motivation by making academic inquiry an opportunity to tap into and cultivate their creativity.
The three forms of inquiry I have proposed serve as a loose framework to understand the perils of exclusionary polarization and de-contextualizing, and outline how Creative Inquiry contextually navigates tensions and polarities. The challenge for students, like the challenge for great musicians, is to develop their skills, knowledge, and insights so that they can develop their own voice, their own way of being in this academic context, and in their work in the world. Framing inquiry as a creative process works on many levels, addressing several aspirations: to make the process of inquiry a creative process; to produce original, meaningful research; to engage in dialogue with others in ways that are generative and challenging; and to create oneself as an inquirer in the context of a larger community, whether one sees oneself as an intellectual, scholar-practitioner, or activist, for example. The great challenge is that every student has an opportunity to create her or his own interpretation of these several dimensions. And every student has the opportunity to create him or herself in the process of academic inquiry.
Students starting graduate school can sometimes understandably be quite anxious. In this new, challenging, generally less rigidly structured, and in some cases more seminar-based environment, students are required to be more self-starting, self-motivating, and self-directed. At the graduate level there is inevitably more ambiguity in terms of the studies themselves. The notion of “the one correct answer” starts to become more problematic. Students begin to see that an issue can be approached from a plurality of perspectives, that these perspectives are sometimes antagonistic, sometimes concurrent, and sometimes complementary. They see that there may be considerable disagreements and even irreconcilable differences between them. This uncertainty can be confusing. Because the “one right way” seems to not apply any more, now it seems that “everything goes,” there are as many perspectives on an issue as there are individuals, and “we create our own reality.”
Anxiety is increased dramatically when students are not clear about the basic parameters of the kind of experience they are encountering, when there is considerable ambiguity. Further, in many educational institutions, and not just alternative institutions, the relationship between the espoused educational philosophies and the everyday work of academic inquiry is sometimes quite tenuous. Students are not clear about the attitude or “frame” with which to approach the actual reality of their work, the basic issues of scholarship like literature reviews. As a result, they can end up going back and forth between the extremes of Reproductive and Narcissistic approaches.
Students may initially believe that the plurality of views and perspectives they encounter exists only in the “leading edge,” “alternative” world of their institution. They may begin to think that in more mature disciplines there is consensus and agreement about what is “right” and what is “wrong,” that there are no heated debates, no major differences in perspectives. The uncertainty then leads to greater anxiety when students wonder if it is a function of the field, of their quirky “alternative” institution, of the nature of knowledge in general, and so on. Students, like all of us, often have a tendency to project their own fears and concerns into whatever void they perceive to exist, in all areas where there are no explicit guidelines. In many cases, for example, they will demand “the answer” from the instructor or from the readings, and assume that if the final and correct answer is not provided, there must be something wrong with the instructor or the readings or the subject matter as a whole.
Faculty must also be careful not to assume that students come with the same background they do. Faculty members have in all likelihood had a somewhat traditional background with all the training in academic scholarship. They may be eager to “got to the leading edge.” Students are in many cases unlikely to know the full extent of the territory that has been traversed to reach the edge. They may also be unaware of the complexities of working at leading edge, which is an art in and of itself, because of the inevitably speculative nature of much of the work.
Finding an introductory way to articulate ways of thinking about inquiry in this new context, based on the Reproductive/Narcissistic responses to this situation, preparing students for a more complex, creative approach to inquiry has, in my experience, served to set students on a good course. I invite students to explore their own thinking about inquiry through the three perspectives. Immersion into this underlying issue of how to approach inquiry (rather than a discussion of specific research methodologies, which I believe should come later) helps to address students’ questions and anxieties while at the same time recognizing the reality of that very anxiety they may be experiencing, making it a subject of inquiry in the context of their educational experiences and the history of knowledge and education.
An example of this relationship between the academic and the transformative emerged in a class I taught recently on Creativity and Personal Transformation. Students were invited to explore the findings of creativity research, and familiarize themselves with some of the key findings about the creative person and the creative process. At the beginning of the course, before they had read the material, they had been asked to explore questions based on this research, and invited to address them in the light of their own experience. After they completed the readings, the students reflected on how to apply the findings of the research to expand their own creative potential. For instance, they explored their own relationship to such classic characteristics of the creative person as independence of judgment or tolerance of ambiguity, or to their own experience of the creative process when viewed from Wallas’s classic four stages of Immersion, Incubation, Illumination and Verification (Wallas, 1976). Grounding these characteristics in their own experience gave them an opportunity to develop a greater understanding of their complexities, implications and applications—it made them more “real” rather than simply theoretical constructs.
Students then explored a variety of psycho-spiritual practices to assist them in the process of exploring the nature of their own creative process, and addressing any blocks they were experiencing. The students were asked to stick with the practices for at least a month, and to familiarize themselves with the origins, theoretical frameworks, and assumptions of the various practices. The underlying assumption was that the academic (the creativity research) was also approached in a transformative way, and the transformative was also approached in an academic way. As a final integrative assignment, students were asked to write their intellectual autobiography from the perspective of age 80, “reminiscing” on how they had applied their graduate studies in their lives, and how their own voice had developed as they immersed themselves in their work and addressed the personal psychological obstacles revealed by the earlier exploration of creativity research. This was also an opportunity for them to address their voice, since emphasis was placed on illustrating not only what they had accomplished, but also who they had “grown into.” Their voice therefore became a crucial aspect of this paper, since it would give the reader an indication of the person behind the actions.
So what does Creative Inquiry look like when it’s at home? How does it differ from Reproductive and Narcissistic inquiry? I will give three examples: the literature review, the development of one’s academic voice, and the capacity to dialogue in class.
The Literature Review
Reproductive Education sees a literature review as merely the demonstration that he or she knows the knowledge base “out there,” so that s/he can get a good grade. The literature review then often becomes a tedious catalog of information, at best organized in chronological order. There is typically little or no effort to connect the various approaches to a subject to each other, or to contextualize them in the student’s own research. There is an almost atomistic approach whereby “bits” of information are collected but seemingly with no effort to show if and how they are connected. There is no connection and therefore no dialogue with the community of fellow inquirers who have also immersed themselves in this subject. The student is not participating in the discourse, but observing it as an outsider. Furthermore, there is typically no attention paid to an audience, in the sense of a contribution to an existing discourse and an articulation of where the student situates her or himself in that context. We can clearly see how the student has drastically reduced his or her context to a relationship with the instructor, and more specifically, a relationship focused exclusively on getting the desired grade.
A Narcissist might see a literature review either as an unnecessary affront to his or her creativity (“Why do I need to read what others have said—I’m creative”), or as an opportunity to state which authors s/he “likes” or “dislikes,” without any justification or contextualization, not giving the reader any insight into why the student prefers X over Y. Again, as with the Reproductive review, the student is not writing with an audience in mind, and therefore does not communicate effectively with others or actually participate in the discourse in any sort of acceptable way, since the writing is always primarily about the self and feelings. Again there is no engagement with the scholarly community, which is approached from a consumer orientation—picking and choosing what one likes and dislikes, based on what texts the student happens to have read. There is no sense of systematic, disciplined inquiry and a real understanding of the issue in the broadest sense. “Freedom” is misinterpreted here in the way that Kant’s dove thought that it could fly faster if there were no air to hold it back.
For Navigators, a literature review is far from a simple, tedious rehearsal of what the “authorities” “out there” said, or a statement of somewhat arbitrary personal preferences. For a student engaging in Creative Inquiry, a literature review becomes an opportunity for a dialogue between the inquirer and those who make up her intellectual context, situating her in that research context, paying tribute to her ancestors, articulating the limitations and challenges of the field, and so on. The student begins to see that the issue she is passionate about is one that has been approached by others, and that she is part of an ongoing community of individuals, sometimes stretching back hundreds of years, who have shared that passion. She then begins to see the literature review as the articulation of a set of relationships, an interpretation of the field, and her way of situating herself in that field (Montuori, 2005b). She finds that she belongs in a community, and yet can also see a way to articulate her own unique voice and contribution to that community.
Key to this process is the attitude of participation in a discourse, of communicating with people, both living and dead, who share one’s interests and passions. I encourage students to write with an audience in mind and the assumption that this paper may be read by members of the new community. This may well be the case if the final assignment is a publishable paper, as it often is. By creating this feeling of active participation the student’s attitude is often transformed and enlivened.
Participation in a community also means developing an understanding of who we are vis-à-vis that community—our identity, our role, our passion, and so on. Exposure to other perhaps conflicting approaches can lead us to reflect on our own beliefs, and to challenging our own assumptions. Where do we stand in the context of the discourse? What can we learn from the many perspectives that have informed our understanding of the subject at hand, from their interactions, oppositions, explorations? This way, a literature review also becomes an opportunity for self-understanding, for the excavation of our implicit assumptions about our topic, our implicit theories, the origins of our beliefs and the relationship between our intellectual development and our biography, and the way we approach our subject.
One student told me the literature review took her to places she didn’t think she could go—both emotionally and intellectually. In her research on the history of women healers, she became aware of a whole set of historical circumstances that she was unaware of, including the systematic killing of women healers portrayed as “witches.” The literature review deeply affected her understanding of the world, and of herself as a woman and a healer. Her immersion in the literature made her even more passionate about her subject, and motivated her to expand her context in time and space to understand the global history and role of women healers, and at the same time look more deeply at some of her own experiences from this broader perspective.
This student found a new way to see her participation in academic inquiry as a creative process—a process of self-creation, of exploring her identity in the context of inquiry. This has, in my experience, been one of the most exciting aspects of the Creative Inquiry frame for students. It creates the opportunity for self-creation and self-discovery through engagement with the academic work. This process is by no means always easy—the same student described having a virtual nervous breakdown as she delved into the literature review and began to deeply question who she was, where she fit into the world she was discovering, and how she might participate in it. As she articulated it later, her research almost spun me into a crisis sometimes. It definitely uprooted all my assumptions and beliefs. It definitely challenged me on every level. It sent me down a rabbit hole that had no return ticket. It takes a leap of faith to do a good creative inquiry literature review and really let all of the new information transform you -- which it will if you are doing creative inquiry correctly. The literature review was a death-rebirth-death-rebirth process. I didn't just have to 'see' my assumptions and beliefs but I had to 'die' to them so new ones could be born. This is not always the most graceful process.
For some, a literature review can be an introduction to a world, a community, a discourse, and eventually a career, that we choose to pursue. It may therefore have a profound impact on the direction of our life. For this student, the literature review became a transformative experience in many different ways, allowing her to understand the world, her work, and herself in a radically different way. Her literature review became a research project that made her aware of a history of women and women healers that had generally been hidden, and eventually led to a new self-understanding and a deeper sense of her mission in the world. Her own passion and involvement in the process gave her a richer appreciation for her subject matter, and a depth of understanding which is lacking in students who have not immersed themselves quite so deeply in their work.
The Voice
If Creative Inquiry proposes that every inquiry is also self-inquiry, and that knower and the process of knowing are inextricably interconnected and indeed mutually constitutive, then understanding the nature and development of our “voice” in the academic context becomes a central issue. The typical Reproductive voice is determined by the requirements of a particular academic style manual. It is a dry, often jargon-laden “Objective Voice from Nowhere.” Many academic journals still promote this kind of writing, but in practice there is an emerging openness to a richer style, formerly reserved for books and essays.
Students often exaggerate and struggle with the constrictions of third-person approaches. As a result they write overly formal papers where any trace of their own contribution and interpretation has been eliminated (typically the case in Reproductive literature reviews, for instance), resorting to referring to themselves, with evident discomfort, as “this author,” even when there has been no explicit request by the faculty member that the student employ this style. A central challenge then is to encourage students to articulate their own interpretations and viewpoints, and their passion, in a way that is scholarly and appropriate to the target journal, rather than fall back on their own assumptions about the constrictive nature of academic writing.
Narcissists tend to write in a style that is very personal, at times reads almost like a journal entry. There tend to be a lot of references to their own personal experience, and to the expression of feelings and opinions, framed in terms of personal “insights.” There is hardly any reference to the context, the larger dialogue that prompted those insights, and while there may be references to other authors, there is generally little or no effort to truly contextualize their views and critically engage the discourse. Narcissists have the tendency to become somewhat fanatical in their views, and have a strong tendency to premature closure, precisely because they are so emotionally invested in their views and are generally unable to assess them critically. The fanaticism tends to appear when the student is questioned about his or her own views. This is because Narcissists assume that “everyone has a right to their opinion,” and that this is an inalienable right of ‘alternative education,’ no matter how off the wall that opinion is. To challenge a person’s views is almost considered an attack on freedom of expression and an attempt to deprive the student of something s/he has a right to.
Developing one’s academic voice is a fascinating process. How we address our colleagues, articulate our ideas, express our thoughts and feelings and intuitions—this is where science also embraces art and “self-making.” Developing a voice as a writer and an inquirer is not an easy process. It’s actually easier, I believe, to write in an “objective,” “third-person” research report style. Once we bring in our own experience, our subjectivity, our feelings about the inquiry, and so on, the whole process becomes much more complex. It veers into the realm of art as well as science, and the criteria for judging the writing become more complex. The author needs to develop skills that are not usually addressed in academia, a coherent framework for integrating personal experience and the “first person” perspective, and articulate it elegantly. My experience has been that even highly trained social scientists can have trouble with a more essayistic or first-person form, because their training has never required of them that they explicitly address their own participation in the work they do. The exploration of our own voice in an academic context, whether in our writing, presentations, or dialogue, is a wonderful opportunity to being a process of self-inquiry and self-expansion, as the social scientist also becomes a writer, and “a contribution to the literature” can begin to mean something “literary” as well as “scientific.”
The exploration and development of one’s voice in the academic context can be the nexus of creative inquiry, the place where all the creative tensions meet, the art and science, the objective and subjective, the rational and the emotional, the universal and the contingent, and so on. Navigating these creative tensions is an ongoing process, and the development of a voice is also an aspiration, not necessarily a goal we can achieve once and for all: as an evolutionary process, we assume that our voice me change and develop over time.
In order to develop a real voice, students need to know themselves well enough, and become skilled enough writers, to contextualize their work in their own experience, to realize when it is appropriate to introduce a story, a personal anecdote, when they can explicitly bring their passion into their work, and how to navigate the “personal” and the “academic” so that they interact synergistically rather than in a way that is awkward, disjointed and/or self-indulgent. In this way, the introduction of the personal voice goes beyond Narcissism to ground the writing in lived experience, wedding the ideas to the realities of life, and perhaps giving an insight into the creative process that led the author to the development of her perspective.
One student wrote:
Finding my voice is a very organic and intuitive process for me. I have to listen deeply to all the voices I've read. I really try to 'hear' what they are saying. Then I have to sit with it and let it sink in deeply. I have to hold all the opposite viewpoints without judging or comparing, just hold them all inside. Then I have to look for the words that create resonance inside of me. Why do they create resonance? Do they articulate a personal truth for me? Do they make me feel comfortable? Then I have to find the words that create dissonance. Why do they make me feel uncomfortable? Do they contradict my beliefs? Do they indicate a part or place in me that needs to grow/expand?
Then I start to write -- again without judgment or fear. I just write about my reactions, feelings, thoughts, intuitions, and insights about the topic. The more honest I am (even if it is uncomfortable) the more I get in touch with my authentic self. Sooner or later, through the process of writing I find that I do have an opinion, I do have a voice, I do have a unique perspective AND my writing has a context because I’ve established a relationship to everyone else who is examining this topic. I know the opinions, voices and perspectives of others and how they compare to my own. I know how my voice fits into the chorus of other voices.
The student tunes into herself, and into her “community,” and then just begins to write—without censoring herself in any way. This is an interesting and useful way of simply getting in touch with oneself and “turning on the tap,” as it were. As the student states, sooner or later she finds that in her writing she is articulating a perspective. Here we see that the very process of writing allows her to articulate her views—views she may not have been explicitly aware of before she started writing. In other words, we create who we are and what we believe as we write. Writing becomes self-creation.
Writing and dialogue give us the opportunity to observe our own voice, to see our thoughts and feelings and intuitions become public and interact with the world. This process points directly to how the academic can be transformative, and the transformative is grounded in the academic. Looking back on their work over time, one can see the increasing confidence and maturity students develop in their writing, and the continual dialogue and integration of their own life experiences and perspectives with the literature, the community. Different contexts require different frames, different angles of approach, from the reflective paper to the varieties of submissions to scholarly journals, and students learn how to express themselves and find their voice for a multitude of contexts and audiences.
The assistance of friends and colleagues helps us to understand ourselves, helps us to understand what we are trying to say, and how we can say it. In the process, we also gain a better understanding of who we are. This is truly an example of “I am because we are.” So our own voice emerges in dialogue with ourself, and with others—and while there may remain some constant aspects of our voice, it is to be hoped that it will keep changing and transforming inasmuch as it will reflect our own changes over the years to come.
Classroom Interaction and Creative Inquiry
In Reproductive Education, classroom interaction emphasizes the importance of trotting out the “right” answer when called upon, with little or no attention paid to anything else. There is often an air of competitiveness in Reproductive classroom participation, and it is not always constructive. It is easy, of course, to become being extremely invested in one’s positions, in being “right,” in wanting to please the instructor in order to get a good grade, and it’s harder to acknowledge the extent that our ego-investment upholds our positions and leads to rigidity and creates an attack/defend, discussion-is-war metaphor—particularly when the parameters we have set for inquiry do not recognize and make that ego-involvement in one’s position itself a valid subject for inquiry. One’s vehemence about one’s position is then rationalized, “because it’s right, of course.” Indeed one can be passionate about something one believes in, but one can also simply want to win a debate, “truth” be damned.
Excessive and/or unexamined ego-investment can lead to an unwillingness to really thoroughly examine the validity of one’s own views, beliefs, assumptions, potential blind-spots, and so on, let alone the psychological dimensions of inquiry (Maslow, 1969). Interlocutors in the classroom can be viewed as opponents to be defeated at all costs, and while competition between conflicting views and perspectives is perfectly appropriate, it all hinges on how one competes, how one treats one’s interlocutors, and whether the exchange is viewed as an opportunity to learn and grow, or merely to dig one’s heels in and defend one’s position from the opposition at all costs (Montuori, 1998).
The Narcissistic mode moves to the group level in classroom interactions, particularly among students sympathetic to the New Age. In a further oppositional identity to Reproductive Education and to “the old paradigm,” students often make sure every voice is heard, and focus on creating a largely uncritical and supportive environment where students can share their feelings about what they’re going through, their emotional responses to their work, to their participation in the class, and so on. When the core assumption is that “everyone is entitled to his or her own view,” to question, challenge, or critique someone’s view—no matter how outlandish it seems--is considered offensive. Typically much more attention is placed on “process” and self-reflection in a group context, than on so-called “content,” the subject matter of the class. In fact, the when the Narcissistic Group-Self is stressed or becomes the central focus of attention, it can easily become a vehicle for self-indulgence and emotional grandstanding. This collective Narcissism occurs because of the often explicit privileging of “process” over “content.” In my experience, if the frame, or the demand characteristic, is that the classroom is the setting for “processing” emotional self-expression in opposition to more “academic” matters, this is precisely what the students will deliver. In my experience faculty have to come with a clear and capacious frame for inquiry in order to avoid these kinds of problems.
Not surprisingly, Creative Inquiry draws inspiration for creative interaction in jazz. If classroom interaction in Reproductive Education is about who can be “right,” and in the Narcissistic Education focus is on uncritical group self-acceptance, Creative Inquiry stresses a spirit of adventure and creative collaboration. Students are invited to explore the unknown together, to embark on a journey of exploration, addressing the issues that really matter to them. Several factors are important and need to be cultivated right from the beginning.
Framing academic work as Creative Inquiry primes students to think of their work as a creative process, which builds a sense of excitement. Students comment that this is an unexpected way for them to think about inquiry and graduate school in general. It stimulates them, not surprisingly, to “think outside the box” in terms of their own work, their capacities, their goals, their understanding of collaborative work, and the way they can participate in an educational experience.
In the context of group and classroom interaction, students are encouraged to see their work as a collaborative creative process. Metaphors from the arts can be useful here, and I personally use the image of a jazz group, of highly skilled improvising musicians who both support and challenge each other during performance (Montuori, 1996, 1998b; Purser & Montuori, 1994). Creative Inquiry provides a frame students can use to make sense of their new activities as an exploration in the unknown, which nevertheless draws on a long tradition. In other words, one has to be grounded in order to take risks, secure in order to allow oneself to be insecure. In the same way that any explorer might prepare for an expedition, develop the necessary skills, carry the necessary tools, etc., and then ultimately go into the unknown and deal with the uncertainty, a student grounds himself in the field, develops skills and a body of knowledge and an attitude of what might be called passionate scholarship, and embarks on a journey. The sense of a creative endeavor is not just limited to “the mind” or “emotion,” or “collaboration,” or “self-exploration,” because music can be viewed as requiring the ongoing interaction of all these elements, and more.
Furthermore, a musician’s ability to perform depends on also on his life experience, as the old saying has it, “you play who you are.” Students are therefore encouraged to draw on their own personal experience, their background, and to bring all of who they are o bear on the dialogue and the inquiry. This involves the ability to integrate the various aspects of one’s being to be present in the moment with as much of oneself as one can bring to bear on the moment. This is contraposition to a rather fragmented view of the “academic” or “intellectual” devoid of emotion, subjectivity, personal experience, bias, and so on. In Creative Inquiry, the challenge is not removing all hints of subjectivity and bias, but rather being able to bring all of oneself, biases and all, to the inquiry—and indeed the biases and assumptions become a valid avenue for inquiry in and of themselves, as part of our self-inquiry.
I believe the Creative Inquiry frame, stressing as it does the role of rigor and imagination, discipline and improvisation, grounding in knowledge bases and creative speculation, can provide graduate students with a generative context for their learning through dialogue, through interaction. The musical metaphor stresses the importance of developing a thorough skill and knowledge base in order to be able to perform, and also the ability to collaborate together on this expedition. Interestingly, it soon becomes very clear that in order to collaborate together, in order to perform, collaboration requires both “soft” intra- and interpersonal skills and “hard” musical skills. It is not enough to be supportive and collaborative if one cannot perform well on harder, more technically demanding passages.
Creative Inquiry emphasizes the value of taking risks and utilizing not-knowing as an ally. Acknowledging our state of not-knowing becomes a way to deepen inquiry rather than a mark of ignorance (hence the use of the term not-knowing rather than ignorance, which carries decidedly negative connotations). The notion of not-knowing is directly related to creativity since the creative process by its very nature leads to something which cannot be known in advance. Research on creative individuals shows that they actively seek out the unknown, challenge assumptions, and have a preference for complexity—for whatever it is that does not fit into established orders and frameworks. Creative Inquiry cultivates these attitudes and characteristics in individual and collaborative settings.
Students are actively encouraged not to try to “look good” by giving easy, pre-digested, “trivial” answers, or even focusing on what they predominantly on demonstrating what they know. They are invited to share their questions and concerns, to use their not-knowing (the fact that they do not have “all the answers,” and that they are embarking on territory that for them is uncharted, both in terms of their overall academic experience and their chosen topic of inquiry) as an opportunity to challenge assumptions, to look at the material with fresh eyes, and to enjoy their journey. Interestingly, over the years I have found that students find it surprisingly hard to approach a dialogue with questions—often because it is simply too unusual and uncomfortable for them to have to say, “I don’t get this,” or because they are concerned that “admitting ignorance,” as it were, when a spiritual matter is involved might be an indication of being somehow “un-evolved.” Creative Inquiry helps student frame the process differently, and allows them to go beyond these concerns.
A key factor in creating an atmosphere of creative collaboration involves entering into inquiry with an attitude of curiosity and excitement, which is stimulated by the fact that the students really do not know the material, and that, certainly at the graduate level, in the context of addressing the human condition in the largest sense, we are all explorers. It is precisely that collective not-knowing and embarking on a journey of discovery together that can create the greatest solidarity, in the same way that jazz musicians do not know what will emerge as they embark on a collective improvisation on a particular song. It is important to re-emphasize that this kind of collective improvisation is only possible with musicians who have (or are developing) solid instrumental skills, a solid grounding in the vocabulary of jazz, and so on. Likewise the students must do the required work, the readings, immerse themselves in the field, and so, on to avoid the pitfall of Narcissism. Faculty can model this creative not-knowing by showing how not-knowing can be a source and motivator for inquiry, rather than a weakness, and one way of doing this is to be discuss one’s own intellectual development, one’s present research agenda, and the pitfalls, uncertainties, and the uncertain and contingent nature of knowledge and inquiry themselves. In other words, to present inquiry with a degree of transparency into the creative process, rather simply its product. I have used a forthcoming book of autobiographical essays from leading “new science” thinkers to give students insights into the development of authors they may be reading, and this allows students to develop a more grounded, a more “human” understanding of the activity of inquiry, of participation in a community of inquirers, of self-creation and self-definition in an academic context, and so on.
One student in her first semester writes:
I asked myself how to be a creative inquirer. I think that a good place to start is to listen to myself: what is relevant for me in this moment of my existence? What is meaningful for me? It’s like asking my self which instrument I am given to play for a jam session. So, I start playing with the instrument. And then I enter the learning community. I need to listen to others, to your voices. How can I enter and attune in the process? How can I attune my voice with your voices? How can my existential questions intertwine with your process? These questions are not meant to be answered: they are expressed to set the intention. We jam together and the instructor warns us: don’t worry about the final outcome, don’t worry about not being an experienced performer yet, we are just first month of the doctoral program..
The talent of the inquirer is to emerge from the field with a melody that attunes with the community’s “chord progression” and contributes to the unfolding of the collective performance. So, I would say that in creative inquiry originality pertains to the relationship between self/community. The community’s learning process enhances individual learning that enhances system learning… a spiral process of mutuality and interdependence. Is the collective melody prior to individual voices, or individual voices is prior to collective melody? The Zen master would ask if the waves are prior to ocean or if the ocean is prior to wave…
In this week’s discussion I have experienced the power of jamming. Sometime I got bored in this discussion; I felt lost; but I have tried to keep open. I have committed my self to drop in and give my 2 cents and read your posting, not with focused attention and with relaxed awareness. I have learned that jamming is as important as performing. In other words, the process of learning as a value in itself, regardless of the content.
The student draws both on her own experience and needs and assessment of what is relevant, and seeks to align it with the dialogue in the group. In the same way that a soloist in a jazz performance expresses herself with her own sound and her own interpretation of the song in the context of the band’s overall reading of the song, this student has sought to align the two. She admits she got lost at times, and became bored, but chose to participate, to show up anyway, and recognizes the value in that participation—the opportunity to learn about the process of participating as well as about the subject matter itself.
Students learn to avoid the extremes of viewing classroom interaction as either a venue for excessive criticism, one-upmanship, and competition in its more unproductive forms, or for excessive navel-gazing, group-processing, uncritical support and unproductive cooperation. In other words, students develop an understanding of the way they can navigate the extremes, avoiding unproductive polarizations and moving towards generative tensions. I encourage them to support each other in the learning, and explain that this is also done through constructive criticism. I frame this in the context of the final assignment, which is often a publishable paper: We are here to help each other write the best possible paper to submit to the journal. And it is our obligation to our colleagues to be critical if the paper has weaknesses—surely it is better to be assisted by one’s own classmates’ criticism, than to have the paper eventually skewered by a reviewer. Students learn to support each other by challenging each other, in the same way that a piano play in a jazz group might challenge the saxophone soloist—playing chords behind him that provide a solid, supportive grounding, but also stretch the soloist with, for instance, unusual chord substitutions, syncopations, and so on.
Summary
The above examples give some idea of how I have used the frame of Creative Inquiry in the classroom. The approach can be developed in many different ways, and many different metaphors can be used, of course. I hope I have given some flavor of the experience here.
Conclusion
I began this paper by presenting some of comments made by graduate students entering incoming “alternative” programs. I then presented three different frames for Inquiry, two based on my assessment of students’ polarized perception of education as either “Reproductive” (traditional) or “Narcissistic” (alternative). I explored some of the cultural and psychological roots of this tendency towards polarization, and then outlined a third approach, Creative Inquiry, which integrates the best of both worlds—i.e., academic rigor and scholarship, and self-inquiry and transformative. I used a series of musical metaphors to highlight the differences between the three approaches, and concluded by giving classroom examples in three different areas.
The quest for an alternative education can itself be an opportunity for transformation—for personal, educational, and social transformation, and for the development of a creative approach to inquiry. If we excavate the polarities that run through our educational processes, uncover the assumptions that split up functions that should be vitally connected, and begin to bring them together, each in our own way, we can, as students, educators, and citizens, become engaged in an ongoing creative process where we not only challenge the way we have thought about education and inquiry and the very nature of our thinking about them, but begin to formulate appropriate ways of envisioning and embodying new possibilities.
REFERENCES
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