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Although I value critical thinking, I have spent much of my personal and professional life utilising and relying upon intuitive knowing in order to do creative work, so cannot dispute its value or validity. The ability to reflect deeply and to question and test knowing, whatever its source is crucial to rigorous inquiry, and yet a critical approach to doing this was not wholly suitable to my needs because it assumes a position of doubt from the outset. It would have been inappropriate and

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unproductive to approach my fieldwork, the three immersive programme experiences of my inquiry, in such a way.

Being asked to take part in a ritual or take on an unfamiliar sensemaking system (see chapters 5 and 6), for instance, requires suspension of disbelief and a willingness to engage openly and fully with the experience unfolding before one. Belenky et al.’s (1986) concept of ‘connected knowing’ denotes an attitude to, as well as a way of knowing, that relies on empathic connection with others. With ‘connected knowing’ the listener empathises with the other and accepts, for the moment, the validity of the other’s knowing, the truth of it for them. Instead of jumping in with doubt and

critique, all judgements are suspended. It entails, as Elbow (2008) puts it, playing “the believing game” instead of “the doubting game”.

Belenky terms connected knowing as a kind of uncritical thinking. It is a willingness to ‘try on’ another’s truth in the belief that something of value may be learned from doing so, while at the same time enabling a deeper connection and understanding of the other to develop. Experiences of this kind should remain open to reflection and critical appraisal after the event, but rely on uncritical immersion in the moment. I resolved to maintain Elbow’s attitude of ‘methodological believing’ in my inquiry and balance it with rigorous reflection.

I developed an empathic attitude to inquiry, characterised by: openness, willingness, non-judgement, awareness of my physical, intuitive and imaginal senses, being fully present, and reflexive. As well as empathy toward others I practiced self-empathy which, according to philosopher Edith Stein (1989), is the ability to observe what and how the self is experiencing whilst remaining fully immersed in an experience. It is like a dual consciousness of being and observing the experience from inside it, which, Smaling (2007) argues, offers a form of objectivity. Similarly, Action Researcher Judi Marshall’s notion of “inner and outer arcs of attention” (1999, p. 433) describes holding multiple layers of attention, a kind of meticulous noticing, where multiple processes are sensed and connections made between different modes and ways of knowing (Marshall, 2001).

Van Manen advocates “the attentive practice of thoughtfulness” (1990, p. 24). The phenomenological attitude has also been described as “the process of retaining an empathic wonderment in the face of the world” (Finlay, 2009, p. 12). On a practical level, Wertz (2011, pp. 132-133) advises we reflect on the relevance of each moment of the experience and ask what is revealed about the phenomenon; explicate implicit meanings that are not clear; distinguish the constituents of an experience; thematise recurrent modes of experience, meanings, and motifs; and verify, modify, and

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Interviewing

Approach

In the 1980s, Anne Oakley (1981) contributed to the feminist influence on qualitative research by challenging the male dominated, positivist social science model of interviewing. Oakley questioned the concern with objectivity and detachment from interview participants, suggesting the predominance of a “masculine mechanistic attitude which treated the interview’s character as social interaction as an

inconvenient obstacle to the generation of ‘facts’” (2016, p. 196). She helped establish new methodological approaches in social science research that recognised and honoured the emotional and relational complexity of research participants.

An important concept and way of framing interviewing is ‘the gift’, (Mauss, 1954). It is the concept of mutual exchange that builds relationships, and it has been adopted as a way of framing the relationship of the researcher and research subject in social science research (Limerick, Burgess-Limerick, & Grace, 1996). When a person agrees to be interviewed, it can be seen as a gift by them to the researcher, akin to a

donation (Oakley, 2016). I think this concept, if respected, can create a relational field, an equality between the researcher and interviewee, because there is dignity in the act of giving. Although reciprocity is not a condition of gift-giving, the interview process can be reciprocal in that sensemaking can be a shared activity between researcher and participant, and talking to an interested party can sometimes be therapeutic (Peel, Parry, M., & Lawton, 2006), or at the least, interesting and perhaps useful in some way to the participant.

I set out to make my interviews, which I preferred to think of as ‘learning

conversations’, a co-creative, joint sense-making endeavour. It felt to me as if my interview participants were co-inquirers because we had shared an experience. I felt that because I had been a full participant in the programmes in every way (fully present, authentic, allowed myself to be vulnerable, shared intimate and difficult details of my life, etc.) it was unlikely that the participants would perceive me as being in a position of power or allow me to overly influence their answers. During the programmes, the participants I later interviewed did not appear to have any difficulty or reticence about expressing their personal opinions or feelings, and I did not find our recorded conversations were any different.

The interviews I conducted were by invitation, which I explicitly framed as a joint learning and sense-making conversation that would be recorded, and may be used in my doctoral inquiry and thesis. Several interview participants said they would like to talk about their experiences for their own benefit, to try to make more sense of the felt meanings of their experiences. I hoped that the interviews with my fellow participants would be of benefit to each of us.

I considered myself as potentially different from my interview participants in two respects; it was possible that I had considered the experience in more ways or on more levels than some of them had done. I doubt I would have thought about the

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experience in so many ways had I not been conducting an inquiry, and I may have focused solely on the insights I gained into my own self-knowing. The other was that I had instigated these follow-up conversations and had the benefit of speaking with more of the participants about their experiences than each of them did as individuals. Rather than manipulate my interviewees (Oakley, 1981), I sought to direct their

attention to aspects of their experience that I hoped they would elucidate. I tried to ask questions that, although were coloured by my own perceptions of the experience, were open enough to let the participant answer in their own way with their own narrative thread (Collins, 1998). I noticed in several instances with different

participants, that a word or phrase I had used was taken up and repeated by them. I worried a little that I had influenced their answers in this way, but I think that perhaps it was simply that the word or phrase I had used (having contemplated the experience at length) usefully encompassed a concept or meaning for them which they

appropriated in their desire to express themselves. I was confident this was the case when a participant repeated my word or phrase in a considering way or commented upon it before appropriating it, but at other times it seemed unconscious, in the way that we unconsciously mirror people’s speech and mannerisms, an act that builds rapport (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999 ). Todres and Galvin put it rather nicely, “New words or rearranged old words … are offered as potentially applicable and transferable to others for their own hospitality so that they can make temporary ‘homes’ for such understanding” (2008, p. 573).