Читать книгу The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice - Группа авторов - Страница 87

Dan Wulff and Sally St. George

Twenty-two years ago, we wrote an article entitled ‘Research as Practice – Practice as Research’ based upon our social constructionist stance (Gergen, 2009, 2015) and our experiences of integrating our practice of family therapy with research. The article was rejected by a journal editor, stating that ‘everyone was already merging research and practice and this was not a new idea’. As new academics at the time, we were crestfallen and took the feedback to heart, even though from our experience we saw little evidence that people were seeing practice and research as the same. We noticed efforts to create bridges and translations across research and practice, but we did not see others re-visioning them as one and the same process.

We have read numerous articles focused on connections between research and practice where researchers focus on the evidence for, and application of, research results to further certain preferred practices (Farley-Ripple et al., 2018). While we see advantages of bridging research results with practice applications, our perspective is to not separate them into two ideas in the first place that then need to be bridged. We have connected with professional kindred spirits who share, at least in part, the interest in seeing research and practice combined into a single initiative (Relational Research Network of the Taos Institute, see https://www.taosinstitute.net/relational-researchnetwork).

We have remained committed to the notion of practice and research being variations of the same thing and continued to experiment with this idea in our practice setting (mostly at the Calgary Family Therapy Centre; St. George et al., 2015b; Wulff et al., 2015). We were impressed by how generative it was in our professional world and became interested in how it could be productively used in other human endeavors, including everyday activities (e.g., making decisions about how to balance work and personal life, choosing how to invest time and money, evaluating job choices and decisions, creating and engaging with preferred life styles) (McNamee and Hosking, 2012).

While joining these two ideas can contribute to research and researchers, our driving motivation is to improve practices with which to go forward. We are not interested in trying to develop a single ‘truth’ or certainty because we believe in the utility of multiplicities (Anderson, 2014; Gergen, 2015). ‘Practices’ could include parents trying to find better ways to respond to problems with a child, teachers looking to provide better instruction or manage learning difficulties, managers of a small business wanting to improve staff/employee relationships or alter the way their service is delivered, nurses wanting better ways to connect with ‘noncompliant’ patients, lawyers who are looking to refocus legal practice to embrace a different orientation or clientele, or religious leaders wanting to reshape their congregation's relationship to the surrounding neighborhood. In all of these situations, seeing practice and research as part-and-parcel of each other facilitates directed movement in the moment.

Examining aspects of a situation, the context, the history, and the persons involved are sensible and useful considerations in planning and taking action. Additionally, our understanding is furthered by noticing how situations respond to action (Kuhne and Quigley, 1997). Investigating situations is integrally linked to the situation itself. Action provides insight and insight provides action. Distinguishing them as two separate processes diminishes each of them.

In this Handbook chapter we will illustrate with everyday examples how common notions of research and of practice unnecessarily distinguish them (McNamee and Hosking, 2012). Everyday examples of deciding what to do or how to do it involve processes to discern the optimal choice(s) for the person given the situation at hand. This is not an attempt to locate the ‘truth’ or the ‘accurate’ choice (Gergen, 2015) – it is an effort to make the best decision for the person given what is available and desired. Considerations of options are predicated on the actions that will or can be taken.

Let us consider how persons decide what kind of transportation to use. Making a decision about buying or leasing a car, car-pooling, using public transportation or taxis, riding a bicycle or walking requires thought and deliberation considering preferences, prior experiences, relationships with employment, costs, and other factors. The consideration of options is connected to the ‘doing’ of the choice – the examining of choices is intimately connected with the eventual performance of the choice. The performance of the choice will include an examination of how the choice is working (or not working) – the ‘doing’ will also involve examination and reflection. Both the doing (practice) and the examining (research) happen concurrently, simultaneously.

Seeing research and practice as merged acknowledges how we make decisions in our everyday lives. Deciding how to go forward is idiosyncratic for each of us and does not lend itself to being categorized as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in an abstract sense. What we do is largely based on what we believe is possible and available – our considerations/reflections are lodged within what we see ourselves as capable of. The optimal answer/decision is the one that fits the myriad of conditions and circumstances involved and that can only be determined by that person or group. We resonate with John Shotter's (2014) views on ‘withness’ and ‘aboutness’ – our work focuses on what is in practice rather than trying to impact or influence practice from a position outside. The idea of research is within practice.

The weddedness of research and practice impacts how practitioners work. A practitioner relates to the situation at hand that involves a client, customer, or a community in a way that points to progressive next steps. The aim is to go forward, not necessarily to fix or to remedy. This is a significant re-imagining for practitioners – the focus shifts from producing change in the client, customer, or community to joining with efforts to take next steps in a preferred direction (Shotter, 2007; Witkin, 2017).

Practitioners undergo this same process when they work with a client in order to understand the nature of the task at hand and to proceed in an effective way. This process of orienting to a client family and their circumstances is a situated endeavor that takes into account a complex of elements in the lives of the clients, the practitioner and his/her way of practicing, and the nature of the service delivery. Research and the production of knowledge about a given problem as detached from practice cannot include enough situational knowledge to fit the specific circumstances of the client. Research knowledge oftentimes needs to be transformed by the ‘user’ of that knowledge to become resonant enough with the context to be useful.

Some of our readers may liken the processes that we have just briefly described to action research, and rightly so (Kuhne and Quigley, 1997). Looking into alternatives and creating change based on exploring the context and the circumstances of the person(s) involved using a series of phases and action steps is the basis of action research. These actions are closely associated with what we are describing in this chapter and closely resemble what we have been proposing in Research As Daily Practice (St George et al., 2015a; Wulff and St. George, 2014), with the primary difference being that we believe that daily living is filled with the ‘action research’ processes without it being formally so labeled. It is an endeavor that is not formalized, specified, or languaged as action research. We might say that ‘action research’ is a formalized and deliberate term for what all people engage in during the course of their everyday lives in making their decisions, big and small.

The centralization and consolidation of ‘research’ activities under the purview of an expert, in our experience, tends to distance people from one another and discourages people without formal scientific training from engaging in examining their own worlds. In this chapter we aim to disrupt the hegemony of research as the exclusive domain of expert researchers, while we would like to acknowledge the importance of ‘expert research’ for what it can provide. Scientific knowledge has helped us understand many aspects of our material existence and has led to the creation of improvements in our health and longevity, our mobility, and technological innovations.

Our point is that researching and/or inquiring is involved in practice and that all practitioners are, by virtue of the very processes they employ, researchers (Schön, 1983). Their ‘research/inquiry’ activities are situated in each unique situation – it is a coordinated project with those affected to determine how to go forward (Simon, 2012). All sorts of decontextualized knowledge, anecdotal information, knowledge from systematic studies, historical perspectives, and creative ideas are germane to the process of figuring out how to proceed. But it is the inquiry that takes place in real time between people (e.g., practitioners and clients) that provides the platform from which to chart the course forward.