Cooperative inquiry for learning and connectedness

Abstract

There has been rising concern about the disconnect between universities, their communities and society at large. This is of special interest to professional schools, whose missions are founded on connecting practice and theory. We argue that cooperative inquiry, an action-based methodology, can help foster connectedness and contribute to healing the university-society schism. Doing this requires more than mere replication of the methodology; it entails engaging in dialectics with practitioners, a process that is mediated both by democratic aspirations and claims of authority. We share our experience working with social change practitioners on collaborative research about leadership, highlighting the dialectics and implications for academics wishing to capitalize on cooperative inquiry for connectedness.

Keywords:

• action learning and inquiry
• practitioner academic collaboration

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on experience from two programs supporting social change leadership: Leadership for a Changing World, funded by the Ford Foundation in partnership with the Advocacy Institute; and Next Generation Leadership, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. We would like to acknowledge the many contributions of the programs' co-researchers and our partners at respective institutions, who over the course of the years have actively shaped our learning. We also wish to thank our colleague, Angie Chan, whose ideas were instrumental in shaping this paper.

Notes

1. See Global University Network for Innovation: http://www.guni-rmies.net/

2. Others are Action Research, Participatory Action Research, Action Science, and Appreciative Inquiry. Bray et al. (2000) call CI collaborative inquiry, but ‘Cooperative’ is the original term coined by pioneers like Heron (1996) and Reason (1999).

3. The argument that CI can heal the practitioner-academic divide may apply equally to other action-oriented approaches including action learning. Since our experience is about cooperative inquiry, the insights are limited to this approach.

4. For a detailed description see Ospina et al. (2004, 2007).