The Role of Reflection in a Co-operative Inquiry
John Heron
Published in D. Boud, R. Keogh and D.Walker (eds)
Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning, London, Kogan
Page, 1985, pp 128-138.
Co-operative inquiry and the experiential learning
cycle
Co-operative inquiry (Reason and Rowan, 1981a) is
primarily a way of doing research with persons rather than on
persons. It breaks down the distinction between researcher and
subject: the researchers are also co-subjects and the subjects are
also co-researchers - everyone involved moves between both roles
(Heron, 1981a). There are many arguments for doing research about
persons this way (Heron, 1981b): the primary one in my view is that
it is the only way of researching persons as fully self-determining,
as beings whose thinking and choosing shapes their behaviour. If the
subjects of research are not being self-determining in the research
situation, that is, if they are being other-directed (by the
researchers), then they are not being fully persons. It is only when
the subjects of research start to participate in the thinking that
generates, manages and draws conclusions from the research - that is
, when they become co-researchers - that they manifest within the
research situation as fully self-determining persons.
Seen in another light, co-operative inquiry is a way
of systematically elaborating and refining an experiential learning
cycle. The inquirers start, as co-researchers, with a phase of
reflection, clarifying the initial idea of the inquiry and a method
of conducting the inquiry. They then implement the method, as
co-subjects, and enter a phase of action and experience. They
complete the cycle by returning to a phase of reflection, to make
sense of the action and experience and modify the initial idea
accordingly. So it is a co-operative way of learning from individual
and shared experience.
Thus in the first co-operative inquiry into
co-counselling (Heron and Reason, 1981), the research group of
co-counsellors decided to map out more thoroughly the different
states of being clients go through during a co-counselling session.
We met for three week-ends at three week intervals. During the first
two weekends, we had a series of short co-counselling sessions. Each
person immediately after their turn as client mapped out the series
of states passed through during the session, with feedback from the
counsellor. All these individual maps were shared and discussed and
refined before the next co-counselling session, the whole process
being repeated several times. During the final week-end the most
developed individual maps were discussed, refined and amended by the
group as a whole , and these collectively agreed and approved maps
became the "findings" of the inquiry.
There was thus individual reflection on experience
by each client immediately after their session; this was followed by
a phase of shared reflection when individual maps were compared and
contrasted. What was learned out of this shared reflection led over
immediately into a decision about what sort of mapping to do in the
next co-counselling session. The final reflection phase sought to
distil the learning that had accumulated over the whole preceding
series of cycles between experience and reflection.
In co-operative inquiry the experiential learning
cycle is systematically elaborated and refined because of the strong
spotlight put upon the reflection phase in the cycle. Since
inquiry is afoot, it is important in the reflection phase, when
the inquirers are making sense of their recent experience , that
they do not distort or misrepresent it. There is a concern to ensure
that the reflection gives a valid account of the experience , makes
veridical rather than illusory assertions about it, and draws
appropriate rather than inappropriate conclusions. Hence some of us
(Reason and Rowan, 1981b; Heron, 1982) have evolved a set of
validity procedures that help reflection upon experience during
co-operative inquiry move in the direction of truth rather than
falsehood.
Aids to valid reflection on experience
Research cycling
If you go round the cycle of experience and
reflection several times then you can progressively improve the
validity of the reflection by testing and resting it against the
content of experience and action. You can repeatedly check your
concepts for what they incorrectly include and incorrectly omit. And
they may change , through recycling, from the vague to the precise,
from the obscure to the clarified, from the superficial to the deep,
from the qualitative to the quantitative.
Divergence and convergence
In the early stages of going round the research
(experiential learning) cycle, it is wise for the inquirers to be
divergent, that is, to explore several different aspects of the
experience being inquired into, and to do so in diverse ways, and to
reflect and report on these aspects in different ways. This is to
ensure that reflection in later stages of the inquiry is not too
narrow but has available to it a comprehensive array of data, varied
and complementary perspectives, which can generate a holistic view.
But if each inquirer on every cycle explores a
different aspect, then no one aspect is ever taken round the
research cycle more than once, so your final reflection may generate
a widely holistic view each of the conceptual bits of which are
somewhat shaky. Hence the case, in later stages of going round the
cycle of experience and reflection, for being more convergent, that
is, for all or several members taking certain aspects of the inquiry
area through two or more cycles, in order to refine and improve
reflection on those aspects. Convergence also means that in later
stages of the inquiry your reflection phases are concerned strongly
with how early divergent findings illuminate, complement, amend and
correct each other. There are clearly innumerable ways in which
divergence and convergence can be balanced and interrelated in the
recycling process. The best balance is no doubt inquiry-specific.
Examples of research cycling, divergence and
convergence
In the first co-counselling inquiry already referred
to, in the early cycles each client was idiosyncratic and divergent,
using any form of mapping to map whatever aspects of their session
they chose. But since all the individual maps were shared after each
co-counselling session, this meant that a good deal of convergent
cross-fertilization led over into the planning of the next cycle.
For I might take up something you had learned from your last cycle
into my intention for exploring and mapping my next session: thus
there was an informal blending of divergence and convergence. Later
in the inquiry we tried out two cycles, in each of which all of us
converged on the same aspect of the client's session. And at the end
of the inquiry in a very extended phase of convergent reflection in
the group as a whole, we took the most coherent maps that different
individuals had refined over previous cycles and all of us took part
in amending and modifying each one until all, including the
originator, were satisfied. And we reflected on how these several
final maps supplemented each other, like photographs from different
angles of the same building.
In a second co-operative inquiry into co-counselling
(Heron and Reason, 1982), the inquiry group decided to explore how
members handled restimulated distress emotion in everyday life when
a co-counselling session was not available. We met once a week from
2pm to 7pm for shared reflection on the previous week's phase of
experience during which however each member had reflection phases by
keeping a regular diary of how they had handled restimulative
incidents during the day. In the weekly group reflection phase , we
shared our diary entries with each other, so that once again there
was a good deal of informal convergent cross-fertilization from one
person's past to another person's future phase of experience. The
diary entries were (convergently) collated at each weekly meeting;
and in the final convergent reflection phase these several
collations were coordinated, then discussed and approved by the
whole group.
In a co-operative inquiry into holistic medicine
(Heron and Reason, in press), 16 doctors met for two-day reflection
phases at six-weekly intervals over a period of nine months. At the
first reflection phase they developed a five-part conceptual model
of holistic medicine; this was cashed out in daily professional
practice very divergently and idiosyncratically for the first two
six-week cycles of action, with each practitioner exploring a
different range of holistic strategies in his or her surgery. In the
next three six-week cycles of action, there were two convergent
sub-groups, one group taking strategies of doctor-patient
power-sharing through three cycles, and another group taking
spiritual intervention strategies in the surgery through three
cycles; and at the same time everyone kept going some of their
idiosyncratic strategies from the first two cycles. In the last
cycle everyone kept all this going, plus everyone using the
same agreed form to identify the range of interventions used with
any 100 consecutive patients. During the two-day meetings for the
reflection phase it was a regular practice for the group as a whole
to reflect on how this mass of divergent and convergent data
influenced the five part conceptual model generated at the outset.
And this act of convergent reflection was fully consummated in a
final four-day reflection phase.
One thing I have learned from co-operative inquiries
so far is that while there is a good deal of informal transfer of
learning from one cycle to another - so that some sort of test and
retest recycling of ideas goes on - it is quite difficult for a
co-operative group to be fully intentional about the discipline of
rigorous retesting and refining of strategic idea through several
cycles. The difficulty is in drawing the learning out of the
previous phase of experience and action with sufficient acuity for
it to be used to shape up clear intention for the next action phase.
To put it crudely, the learning sometimes (but by no means always)
seems to slop over from one action phase to the next, with people in
the intervening reflection phase having a strong intuitive feel for
what is going on and only a partial or limited intellectual grasp of
the transfer process.
What aids both divergence and convergence are
sharing and comment-or-feedback. In the reflection phase of the
group, each shares their recent past experience and how they have
made sense of it: the resultant comparisons and contrasts between
individuals' accounts will bring out both divergent and convergent
aspects of these accounts. Similarly my comment on your account, and
my feedback on your recent experience (if I was there at the time),
will also throw into relief both different and similar perspectives.
All this is essential for valid reflection, for holistic inquiry and
learning. The truth is surely found where different
perspectives converge to illuminate common
ground. And unless you get enough difference or divergence, you
won't get really illuminating convergence.
Balance between reflection and experience
The validity of the reflection phase will in part be
a function of how much reflection there is in relation to how much
experience. Brief and cursory reflection upon deep and extended
experience is not likely to yield up much truth-value. Similarly
with elaborate and prolonged reflection upon a fleeting trace of
experience. A healthy time ratio will no doubt depend upon the sort
of experience , and the quality and intensity of the reflection. A
few moments of mystical experience may legitimate hours of
contemplative reflection; whereas many hours lying in an immersion
tank may require only some minutes of reflection. An inquiry group
will need to pay some attention to this from time to time and
monitor the balance to see whether they have got it right. Since a
good balance is so inquiry-specific, I don't think that any rules
about it can be drawn up.
In the first co-counselling inquiry, each person had
typically a 20 minute experience working as client followed
immediately by a 15 minute reflection phase to make an individual
map of that experience. This was then followed by perhaps an hour of
a group reflection phase when all the individual maps were shared
and compared. So the total reflection time was very much greater
than the experience time. In the second co-counselling inquiry this
sort of ratio was reversed. The experience phase was a week of
restimulative incidents - small or large, few or many - and the
reflection phase a half a day a week for sharing and collating diary
entries. In the holistic medicine inquiry, the experience phase was
six weeks, with two-day reflection phases. Of course, in these last
two inquiries, the experience phase contained sub-phases of
individual reflection when each member was writing up a diary,
keeping notes and records. In these three inquiries , the different
time ratios seemed in each case to be about right. But especially in
the last two mentioned, it may be that "seemed right" got confounded
with the virtual impossibility of changing the dates in everybody's
diaries.
Authentic collaboration
Since the inquiry is co-operative , validity in the
reflection phase is also a function of how fully each person is
contributing to the reflection, and how much each person is doing
their own thinking and not merely echoing the views of one or more
other persons in the group. Only if there is maximal participation
from everyone in each of these two senses, does the reflection phase
get the greatest benefit from the interaction of divergence and
convergence. In the three inquiries mentioned above, individual
reflection phases were built into the design; each person mapped a
session, kept a diary, recorded work in the surgery. And in group
reflection in each case there would be time, either in the whole
group or in sub-groups, for each person to share their individual
reflections with the others.
But after that, in more free-wheeling discussion in
the whole group, contribution rates could start to get out of hand,
with high contributors tending to take over the business of making
sense of past experience and of planning forward. So there needs to
be some conscious monitoring of contribution rates in these sorts of
open discussion periods, otherwise collaboration can be restricted
to a small group of dominant and articulate people.
Management of unaware projections
The notion here is that making sense of past
experience during the reflection phase can be distorted by emotional
distress that is stirred up by the inquiry process per se and
by attendant phenomena of group interaction and so on. The whole
business of communicating meaning, of being true to one's real and
felt nature, of doing justice to what is actually going on, of
honouring the reality of others , may not only generate anxiety and
emotional agitation in present time; it can also powerfully evoke
unresolved distress from early life when precisely these sorts of
issues are so critical in the emerging identity of a young person.
If such restimulated distress is not dealt with during the inquiry
it may be unawarely displaced into the inquiry and cause : lapses in
motivation and commitment during the experience phase , lapses in
diary keeping and record keeping during the individual reflection
phases, confusion in getting at the real learning during group
reflection phases and confusion in forward planning, cumulative
interpersonal tensions that distort genuine cooperation and
participation, and so on. I think I've seen all this occurring to a
greater or lesser extent in the three inquiries mentioned.
Paradoxically, in the first co-counselling inquiry,
we were so busy mapping client sessions on anything and everything
else , that we did not include any sessions on distress evoked by
the inquiry itself, until that distress caught up with us at the
start of the last week-end meeting in an outbreak of dissatisfaction
and confusion. Then we took time out to co-counsel and to reflect on
it.
In the second co-counselling inquiry we were alert
to this issue from the start. But since the focus of the inquiry was
how to handle restimulated distress in ways other than having a
co-counselling session, we were faced with a curious dilemma: if we
discharged off the distress generated by the inquiry, then we
undermined the objective of the research which was to study how we
managed restimulation other than by emotional discharge; but if we
did not discharge off that sort of distress, then maybe the validity
of the inquiry would suffer if alternative coping strategies were
ineffective. In the event, we decided to let each person deal with
this dilemma as they felt appropriate - either taking time during
our meetings for discharge or adopting non-discharge methods. Only
one person during our meetings used the discharge approach, and this
only once. I am still perplexed by the dilemma, but think on balance
it would have been better to take time out during the meetings to
co-counsel on inquiry provoked distress, leaving the focus of the
inquiry to be addressed in everyday life - which is really where the
issue of handling restimulation without discharge arises.
In the holistic medicine inquiry, we dealt with the
matter more fully. Every two-day meeting had built into it a two to
three hour process group especially for members to deal with any
tensions provoked by the inquiry: much of this was interpersonal,
with episodes of personal work on regression and catharsis. We also
had occasional co-counselling sessions. I don't think that by any
means we dealt with all the unaware projections and displacements
going on, but we kept the whole process reasonably sweet.
Falsification
One of the main problems about taking an idea down
into experience in order to test it and retest it, is that you have
to be pretty committed to the idea for you to want to do this. Not
only this , since the idea defines the sort of experience you are to
have, you have to believe in it sufficiently in order to get the
appropriate experience. Then again, once the idea has become clothed
with your own experience, it becomes warm and endearing to you. For
all these reasons you acquire a vested interest in not noticing the
inadequacies of the idea in the face of experience. Hence the
importance of falsification as a check on validity in the reflection
phase.
What this means in each individual reflection phase
is that you need to be vigilant in noticing how your ideas
misrepresent your experience, by including what was absent in the
experience or by excluding what was present, or by distortion of
what was present. So you need to be in a state of "alternative
theory availability" , not unduly wedded to any one set of ideas as
a way of making sense of the experience. This is paradoxical, for if
the experience is to be identifiable at all as this, that or the
other kind of experience , it is already clothed in some modest set
of ideas.
In group reflection you can also use the sharing of
others and, of course, the comment or feedback of others as an aid
to falsification: what others say about their experience and their
feedback on your experience or comment on your ideas, may show up
ways in which your ideas misrepresent experience. But a good device
in group reflection is a formal devil's advocate procedure. In the
holistic medicine group, we had a stick in the middle of the room
during group reflection times. Anyone could pick up the stick and
become formal devil's advocate, radically challenging the
assumptions underlying the ideas being discussed, coming up with
alternative and often reductionist ways of interpreting the data
from experience. The idea of the stick was that by taking it up you
were giving notice that you were engaging in a falsification test
rather than expressing a personal point of view.
In a five day co-operative inquiry into altered
states of consciousness, we kept a record of each person's reports
on what they had considered to be altered states arising from the
various experiences we devised. Later in the inquiry we set up the
following devil's advocate procedure. Each member in turn sat in a
chair in front of the group and had read out all his or her
individual reports of altered states. It was then open to anyone to
come forward and to give a critical, sceptical, reductionist account
of any one or more of these reports, reducing the report of an
altered state back to some misrepresentation of a quite ordinary
state. The member whose reports were thus being reduced would listen
carefully and then either (a) argue persuasively that their own
account was more plausible than the reductionist account, or (b)
hold to their intuitive conviction of the validity of their account
if it withstood the devil's advocacy, or (c) yield to the
reductionist account if it honestly seemed more plausible.
Open boundary feedback
Some inquiries have closed boundaries: they deal
with matters entirely internal to their members, like the first
co-counselling inquiry which was researching client states of
members only. Others have open boundaries: in the experience and
action phase people other than members are involved and affected,
like the holistic medicine group whose members in the action phase
were relating to their patients. So validity in the group reflection
phase is clearly enhanced if there is some data on, and feedback
from, those other people with whom inquirers interact at the open
boundary. In the holistic medicine group members did contract to
gather in patient feedback.
Chaos
One thing we discovered on the first co-counselling
inquiry: it really is important for the group to be able to tolerate
intermittent confusion, ambiguity, uncertainty, chaotic profusion of
issues and possibilities and apparent difficulties. Otherwise there
may be a tendency in group reflection phases for members to press
for premature intellectual closure as a defence against the anxiety
of the whole process. Clearly this is not in the interests of valid
reflection. So the group needs to hang in with the chaotic profusion
for a while, and wait for a genuinely creative and illuminating
order to emerge in its own good time.
Sorts of reflection involved in co-operative inquiry
There is of course no absolute distinction between
reflection and experience: the most abstract reflection is fed by
the memory traces of past experience, and all perceptual experience
has a conceptual dimension of interpretation and identification. So
before dealing with the reflection phase proper, let me mention some
relevant cognitive attitudes during the experience phase.
Open awareness
This is the bedrock of experiential knowing:
bracketing off preconceptions and being fully open to self in
situation, to the abundance of the experience - in its obvious and
in its subtle aspects, at its surface and in its depths. There is
probably an element of extra-linguistic awareness in this: to
the extent that it is possible, entering that aspect
of perception that is prior to the acquisition of, and underpins the
revisionary use of, language. It is openness to process and presence
as such, as pure morphology.
Phenomenological discrimination
This is a subtle cognitive activity that grows out
of and goes with open awareness: identifying what is going on
while it is going on, discriminating the contours, aspects and
dimensions of the experience from within it. Where there is
obscurity or ambiguity in the phenomena it may mean trying out
different ideas for their ability to clarify or resolve perception.
There can be on the spot falsification: seeing whether alternative
ideas to those which took one into the experience do more justice to
it. At a basic level this may mean moving to and fro between
extra-linguistic and linguistic perception: moving between the
experience as one of pure form and process and the experience as
perceived within the categories that come with the use of language.
This phenomenological discrimination may be exercised when a person
is more passive and quiet in the experience phase, or -and this is
rather more challenging - when a person is actively engaged with
some performance or interaction with others.
This discrimination during experience requires a
subtle balance of attention. If your attention gets too caught up in
the experience , too absorbed or hypnotized by it, then effective
discrimination ceases. And if your attention gets too disengaged
from the experience, then the experience becomes withered and
reduced, and discrimination degenerates into dissociated,
unsupported abstraction.
Active choosing
During the experience phase you will also have to
make intelligent choices about how to carry your action forward. So
this means thinking creatively and flexibly about your next moves
while acting in the middle of some developing situation. As with
discrimination, a balance of attention is required: becoming too
absorbed in current action may result in relatively blind "choices";
while too much detachment may lead to vacillation or missed
opportunity.
Sorts of thinking involved in the reflection phase
Now I come to some of the sorts of thinking involved
in the reflection phase as such. Many of them are interlocking and
overlapping.
Loose construing and divergent thinking
These may tend to go together during reflection
phases in earlier stages of the inquiry, nevertheless they are not
the same. Loose construing means making sense of past experience
with a light and loosely fitting set of
concepts that let the experience breathe, that tolerate obscurities
and ambiguities, that avoid premature intellectual closure. In early
reflection phases it is better to be vaguely right than precisely
and tightly wrong. Divergent thinking means considering diverse
aspects and perspectives of the past experience , and in different
ways. This too is particularly important in early stages of the
inquiry, as I have discussed in some detail above. Both loose
construing and divergent thinking may be aided by the three
following processes.
Presentational construing
What I mean here is making sense of past experience
in nonverbal ways, by drawing and graphics, by painting, by
nonverbal demonstration, by movements, by mime, by sound and music.
This can be done as a sort of learning in its own right, and also to
loosen up creative, divergent verbal thinking. In the first
co-counselling inquiry, members used a lot of graphics in making
sense of their individual client sessions, and with good effect.
Free or directed association
Making loose and divergent sense of past experience
may be facilitated by associating freely or directedly to it. I
don't think we ever used this formally and explicitly as an exercise
in group reflection phases in any of the inquiries mentioned, but I
think it would have been a good idea to have done so.
Use of metaphor, analogy, allegory, story telling
These are all ways of harnessing the power of
imagination to yield subtle and comprehensive views of past
experience. It can be argued that they unfold a dimension of truth
sui generis, and also alert the discursive intellect to a
more holistic analysis. I think that none of our inquiries
adequately exploited their potential.
Qualitative description and theorizing
These are two basic levels of reflection in
the reflection phase. The first involves getting out a comprehensive
set of basic phenomenal categories to describe the experience,
covering pertinent aspects - clear and obscure, central and
peripheral, obvious and subtle. The second involves some higher
order, explanatory account of what has been going on as depicted by
the phenomenal categories.
They roughly coincide, respectively, with earlier and later stages
in the inquiry; and with loose construing/divergent thinking and
tight construing/convergent thinking.
Tight construing and convergent thinking
These may tend to go together during reflection
phases in later stages of the inquiry, but are not the same. Tight
construing means working for greater coherence and density in the
conceptual framework that makes sense of the experience phases.
Convergent thinking means reflecting on divergent aspects and
perspectives , refining each and bringing out the common ground they
illuminate.
Modes of theorizing
Higher order explanatory reflection may itself
involve one or more different sorts of thinking, as follows (Reason
and Rowan, 1981c):
Causal thinking Yields explanations in
terms of linear cause and effect sequences.
Systems thinking Yields explanations in
terms of patterns of interaction, of simultaneous dynamic
mutual influence, which cannot be reduced to explanations in
terms of linear cause and effect.
Dipolar thinking Yields explanations
that take account of the interdependence of polar opposites,
that avoid unipolar reductionism.
Contextual thinking Yields explanations
that acknowledge that all interpretations of experience
emerge out of a cultural and historical context.
Practical thinking Yields practical
knowledge about action of such forms as "When we wanted to
achieve B, then we did C" , "When we did X, then these
intended or unintended consequences followed".
The experiential ground of reflection
The reflection phase can only work with the fruits
of the experience phase, and everything depends on whether the
inquirers are "awake" or "asleep" during the experience. They are
"awake" if they are practising what I have described above as
open awareness, phenomenological discrimination, and active
choosing while they are up at the experiential frontiers. They
are "asleep" if their attention becomes too identified with what is
happening and they slip back into conventional, routine , habitual,
ad hoc ways of being. If they stay "awake" they bring lots of
fruit for reflective harvesting. If they fall "asleep" then there is
a meagre yield.
Experience and reflection as mutually enhancing
One of the important benefits that members of
co-operative inquiries report upon, is that the regular phases of
group reflection enhance people's ability to stay "awake" during the
experiential phases, which in turn, of course, makes the group
reflection more productive. The shared consciousness-raising that
occurs during group reflection gives a great boost to sustaining the
appropriate balance of attention during the phases of experience.
And this yields further benefit.
In the first co-counselling inquiry, several members
reported that their co-counselling sessions done as part of the
inquiry were more effective and penetrating as sessions: balance of
attention for emotional discharge was better, picking up and moving
on one's own cues was sharper. It seemed that the extra-margin of
awareness needed for practicing phenomenological discrimination
during the session improved the session as such. And in the second
co-counselling inquiry, members were more alert to the occurrence of
restimulation in everyday life and more able to take charge of it in
diverse ways other than emotional discharge in a co-counselling
session. The moral seems to be that if we set out collectively to
learn about certain sorts of experiences by moving several times
between the poles of the experience and collective reflection upon
it, then apart from what we learn, we also have higher quality
experiences of that sort. And this seems to be rather good news.
References
Heron, J. "Experiential
Research Methodology" , in Human Inquiry (below). 1981a.
Heron, J. "Philosophical Basis for a New Paradigm",
in Human Inquiry (below). 1981b.
Heron, J. Empirical Validity in Experiential
Research, University of Surrey, Human Potential Research
Project, 1982.
Heron, J. and Reason, P. Co-counselling: An
Experiential Inquiry, University of Surrey, Human Potential
Research Project, 1981.
Heron, J. and Reason, P. Co-counsellinq: An
Experiential Inquiry II, University of Surrey, Human Potential
Research Project, 1982.
Reason, P. and Rowan, J. (Eds.) , Human Inquiry:
A Sourcebook of New Paradigm Research, Chichester, Wiley,
1981a.
Reason, P. and Rowan, J. "Issues of Validity in New
Paradigm Research" , in Human Inquiry (above). 1981b.
Reason, P. and Rowan, J. "On Making Sense" , in
Human Inquiry (above). 1981c.