Reflection & Learning Journey

We have now all but completed Unit 6, the penultimate Unit of this MOOC. In doing so, we have had the opportunity to hear the first-hand reflections of a number of scholars who have sought to combine care-full and co-creative research practice. As their accounts have illustrated, nurturing co-creativity can involve both tangible and intangible elements of creative design. Similarly, creativity can be implicit or explicit in what is asked of participants, and research exercises can range from activities that are relatively mundane to those that might be thought of as far more extraordinaire.

As such, co-creativity can either be an integral component of a traditional research method, or it can require that such a method be turned on its head and turned inside out. Ultimately, though, whilst some methods may lend themselves more easily to advancing the co-creative potential of research practice, the realisation of this potential resides as much in the process of doing research and being engaged care-fully, as in the actual components of a particular method. When practiced care-fully, a vast array of research methods can (and do) invoke co-creative thought and action.

It is because of this framing of co-creativity that we have not imposed any restrictions in this Unit to the categorisation of methods as creative where they are more overtly recognisable as such by design. Nor have we attempted to construct a list of which methods are, or are not, co-creative in their composition. Doing so would be misguided at best. Rather what we have been most interested in through this Unit is exploring and illustrating ways of nurturing and enabling the realisation of co-creativity through the very potential of the care-full encounter.

Whilst much of this Unit has been based upon the recently published book collection on ‘co-creativity and engaged scholarship’, which formed one of the main outputs of RECOMS, this has been complimented by drawing also on other examples and models of co-creation as well as considering:

• phases and scales of co-creation
• types of stakeholders
• and different ways of learning.

Throughout this Unit we have maintained a critical edge in thinking through the realities of becoming more response-able in our various attempts at caring with. This has included considering issues like:

• giving vs taking,
• caring too much

and other tricky questions such as:

• how to deal with failure  
• and how to measure the impact of care-full scholarship

To conclude this Unit, the ambition of ‘making a difference’ through co-creative research endeavour requires simultaneously both a clear strategy and a retained openness for the unknown and unforeseen. This in turn calls for an emphasis on iteration rather than linearity in the research process, a prioritisation of dialogue, a sustained pursuit of self-reflexivity, an embracing of “emotional, embodied and intuitive forms of knowing” (Shrivastava and Ivanaj, 2011:84), and simultaneously, an altogether greater recognition of the relational nature of scholarly practice. The latter not only attests to the importance of caring for and with others, but also of self-care.