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How to turn professional experience into practical knowledge? How to reflect over one’s professional practice in order to improve it? How to further develop a practitioner’s responseAbility when facing challenging situations? Already Aristotle spoke of practical knowledge in terms of prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis), a notion which is also reflected in the term Bildung. In this podcast, the hosts prof. Michael Noah Weiss and prof. Guro Hansen Helskog are examining central aspects of this knowledge form and its relevance in professional studies by talking to different scholars who made significant contributions to the field. Listeners can get hands-on ideas on how to develop practical knowledge in their own professional contexts.
Hosts:
Michael Noah Weiss & Guro Hansen Helskog
Edited Podcast Transcript:
ResponsAbility
Dialogues on Practical Knowledge and Bildung in Professional Studies
By Michael Noah Weiss and Guro Hansen Helskog
#9 Action Research, Dialogue and Spirituality | Hilary Bradbury
Michael N. W.:
Welcome to the Responsibility podcast, as always with Guro Hansen Helskog as the co- host
Guro H.H.:
and Michael Noah Weiss as the host.
Michael N.W.:
We were really looking forward to this episode today because our guest today is a key figure in the vast international movement of action research. Welcome Hilary Bradbury. Hilary Bradbury. It's so wonderful to be here.
Hilary B.:
Thank you.
Michael N. W.:
Hilary, you are editor of the Sage Handbook of Action Research with the 3rd edition and incredible 79 contributions. It is, without doubt a mile and cornerstone of action research, and furthermore, you are one of the founders and editor in chief of the Action Research Journal. And last but not least, you're also curator of the Action Research plus online platform.
Guro H. H.:
Your background is really impressive, and we are wondering: What was your motivation and driving force to get involved in action research in the first place?
Hilary B.:
Well, first of all, thank you so much for the lovely invitation, and I've been listening to others of your podcasts, and it is great gift to the world of action research. As to how I became involved. Well, I was sitting on a sofa with Peter Reason while I was a doctoral student at Boston College. I was doing a PhD in organisational change and transformation, and here I was sitting on a sofa at a kind of an evening hosted by Bill Torbert, my mentor. And Peter and I started to talk about action research and, you know, the way in which we see this. This work is now flourishing around the world, but at that particular time there was no one easy way to see one another's work. And so out of that came the first and the second Sage Hand Book of Action Research with Peter and me, and then when Peter retired, I continued with the third one. So that's where the handbooks came from. And I would say - also therefore my own orientation to action research - very much in that particular stream of action research with a mentor like Bill Torbert, as I mentioned, and also Peter Senge, who was in Boston at the time. So, I guess the short answer is that I was very, very lucky to have marvellous mentors back in the late 90s, and that is really what got me started with my own work.
Guro H. H.:
Just to let our listeners have an introduction, what is action research?
Hilary B.:
Oh no -the famously difficult question “what is action research”! At its simplest, I would say it is this alchemical relationship, that most of us find great, in bringing our research and inquiry to action, and to do that with others, with systems actors around conversations that matter. So, the action and the inquiry coming together with others around issues that matter, that's kind of how I would define it. I personally have a background a little bit like you both - in philosophy and theology, that's where I started out in Ireland, and went on actually to Harvard and University of Chicago following that thread, and very much loving it, you know, and Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault - they kind of opened up my eyes to a world that is, in my mind, different from the current world. But then the question, well, how do we get from here to there struck me as a very practical question. There's nothing particularly in philosophy that helps us in that way, and therefore a more pragmatist orientation from the action research arena seemed very relevant. So very early on, I became involved with a group at MIT called the Centre for Organisational Learning at the time, and we would meet in dialogue. This was a dialogue process that - maybe you would know the work of Bohm - a little bit, you know, philosophy, physics, but also reality. And then in that would be many business leaders. So, beginning to use dialogue processes to come into conversation about how do we do something different - that, to me, became the heart - I would say - of how I think about action research.
Michael N. W.:
You just mentioned several philosophers. I would like to take one of the quotes that you have on the action Research plus platform. There you write that the action Research Journal has been developing and publishing actionable knowledge since 2003. And since philosophy also, especially philosophy of science, is about developing knowledge, my question to you is what do you mean with actionable knowledge?
Hilary B.:
Yeah, so we start with an easy way to understand that. Actionable knowledge is a way of articulating what we know such that it's clear how we might begin to take steps together around doing something. So, therefore the implications, the directions. I am very interested in issues of eco feminism, ecological thinking, feminist thinking, how they come together around how we can live in a different way, in a more participatory way, in a more partnering way. So that is my kind of philosophical understanding of the world, which is a rather complex understanding, let's be honest. But then the question arises_ Well, what does it mean to take action in a participatory way? How does this knowledge become actionable, going back maybe to the original definition that I suggested? There's something about coming together with others, with system actors and in a way so we could be in informal Bohm-dialogues, or we could just be in local groups where we are beginning to ask ourselves: How do we take action on participating more with the community? Those conversations for action become incredibly important. You know, maybe Juanita Brown's work on World Cafe. There are many ways to do it, but then it begins to show up as getting involved in local politics. You know, I've been involved with the Green Party and now the Social Democrats. So that's one way in which I do it. But that also includes talking with system actors helping people who are running for election another way is, you know, beginning to know the local farmers. How do I buy their produce? How do I help them sell their produce? Because the conversation at the heart of it is translating into action. The philosophy of eco feminism with others around things that matter. Does that make sense?
Michael N. W.:
Absolutely, thank you very much. And in that regards, I would also like to ask you, can you elaborate a bit on the differences between the form of knowledge that you develop in action research compared to more conventional research?
Hilary B.:
Yeah, I think this issue of it being actionable is really the key. So the epistemology of empiricism that most of us have been trained with, positivism, or whatever we want to call it, it essentially renders us passive because we've become observers of the world outside ourselves. We all know that this is a mistaken understanding the world. We know this, especially those of us who've been trained in philosophy, you know the I mean, we could go back to Plato or certainly Schopenhauer or, you know, where there's a constructivist understanding that I participate in the world. I'm not simply looking at it from the outside. And so therefore, we could call this kind of knowledge constructivist, which I think is a big movement, or postmodernism. It's a big movement inside of a philosophy and ways of knowing. The tricky thing is that there is a naive understanding of epistemology among social scientists. There isn't the understanding that we are constructing the world together, and therefore there's this ongoing encouragement for empiricist, objectivist work. So therefore, bringing it back to the journal, we live in the world as it is, we can't remake the world. So, we do have to encourage people to be very empiricist and objective - what actually is happening. What are data points in the in the real world? Obviously, that is deeply important, but in the journal, and I would say in action research, as I understand it, we are also including the intersubjective and subjective aspects of that. So actionable knowledge at a deeper level implies that we are bringing together objective, intersubjective and subjective ways of knowing such that we end up with more robust knowledge and ways of working together and it's not so much - yeah, let me stop there.
Guro H. H.:
Let us just stay a bit with this conflict between conventional or mainstream research and action research. In your introduction to the Sage handbook, you have an interesting chart where you present differences and similarities between action research, applied research, and conventional research. And in this chart, you state that evidence in action research might be both experiential, partial, emergent, dialogic, intuitive and quantitative. Can you elaborate a bit on the notion of evidence in action research?
Hilary B.:
Yeah, great, great question. So, if we're suggesting that we take this constructivist turn, and that we are participatory, all of a sudden objective evidence out there in the world is also being understood as coming through the filters of our conversation and sense making and then into me, who's kind of at the centre of, you know, each actor is at the centre of their own understanding and action. So therefore, evidence - there's the work of actually being in dialogue together, and then there's the work of writing up the paper. So we can have different kinds of evidence, right?
But let's take the dialogic form. I just recently, for example, published a paper on sociodrama from Hungary. So, the idea that socio drama is a form of dialogue where people are embodied in their actions and in this particular case it was in a hospital setting – anaesthesiology - we were kind of working out some of the issues around authority. OK, so they were doing socio dramas on that. So, the evidence, if you will, of the challenges that they are facing are in the socio drama itself. So, they are in the dialogue itself. And therefore, there can be a slowing down. And what do you really mean when you take that stance? What is your understanding of power here? What is your understanding of giving feedback? How much collaboration is there? So, the evidence is triggered, if you will, by the actual self-experience - the embodied work that the people are doing together. So that is within the dialogue process itself.
Then if we write up am article about that. I mean, the way the information is gathered needs to be acknowledged, of course, but also, we need something much more tangible. So if power is, you know, the first time one form of power is the anaesthesiologist tells the nurses what to do. And then the second time there's a little bit more conversation, a little bit more workshopping between them. Once a month or whatever. So, then we see that there is a shift in power dynamics through a new practise that has been taken off. Am I making sense? So, we have objective evidence about something that is now changed in the system, and hopefully benefits patients and so on, using evidence from the objective and subjective ways in which the the work was done.
Guro H. H.:
And - do you see action research as placed within the social sciences mainly or how does also the humanities play a role in action research?
Hilary B.:
Yeah, and it could be that we have slightly different boundaries around what are the human sciences and what are the social sciences? I say action research is for anybody who wants to, you know, bring improvement to the world. I know some Swedish colleagues who are talking about action research as improvement science. I mean – it is actually a nice way, it is not a perfect way, but it is a nice way of talking about action research as well. So, I would say. It's for anybody. My goodness, it is for anybody, but it is really in the professional schools of the social sciences - the medical schools, the social welfare schools, the business schools, which is where I myself was professor and so on, that it is really beneficial. It is just those are the places where actionable knowledge is actually more useful.
The problem is: There is not enough focus on epistemology. There is not enough theory of knowledge. People do not get enough grounding of that, which I think would happen in the humanities. So, there does seem to be the need to integrate more, and just by the way I am a fan of your work with your philosophical dialogues, I think that is a way to socialise people into understanding that we are not just passive recipients of the world. We can co-create, and in these dialogues, as I understand your philo-dialogues, people can create something new through conversation. That is awfully important, and many, many students, as you know, don't have that experience. I see my daughter. She studies in the United States. She is in Ireland right now on a semester abroad, and she suffers. They lecture at you for 50 minutes, and you know, really this implies you are going to be a passive recipient of knowledge. So, to come back to your question, human sciences, social sciences. Yeah. isn't it about the epistemology that we're using?
Michael N. W.:
Yes, and I would then like to go on to another aspect of action research and that is diversity of approaches within that field. Because Guro and I often work with a research approach called reflective practise research, which can be understood as a form of philosophy or also ethical action research. Just to explain it with very few words: What we do is to take a practise experience or an experience that made us wonder and then ask the question what is at stake in that experience. Then we develop certain themes and topics out of that question, and then we try to bring the themes and topics into dialogue with theories and philosophies, with the main purpose to get a deeper understanding of what is this situation actually, or this experience actually about, and in that way, we try to improve our understanding of our practises, and also ourselves as practitioners. And with investigating general aspects of the human condition, so to speak, by asking what is at stake in these narratives. This is also what we call a philosophical approach. Now, several scholars and several of our colleagues understand this approach as phenomenological hermeneutical, and you find such approaches in Socrates. Olav Eikeland understood the approach as a form of action research. However, we have also been critizised that such an approach is not science, because we are reflecting upon the subjective experience of the practitioner researcher. That does not meet the scientific criteria of objectivism, our critics have argued, and now, what would your answer to such a critique be? You have probably often also heard the same about action research?
Hilary B.:
Oh yes, I've heard this before, and it goes back to the my use of the term epistemological naivete. I mean, the person who's critiquing you is coming from a form of thought, the empiricist positivist, something like that, right? And your own work as philosophers who have moved into the world of practise, like, wo, that makes you a very small percentage, doesn't it? Of philosophers in the world who have taken this move, which I think is fabulous. And the two schools of thought do not speak. OK, so I'm very used to that. I have a paper myself, by the way, in peer review right now and. I got one reviewer who said s/he loves this paper, and the other said “I don't know much about action research, and a part of me really likes this paper, and I see this value. But, I don't think that this is science”. Because you know you're “only working with 50 people” and blah blah and and then, you know, the idea that we can just hammer out some new understanding of epistemology is a little bit hopeless unless people understand that they have an epistemology - that empiricism is its own epistemology.
So, this is what makes the dialogue, I put my hands here, as if they were equal. They are not really equal. I mean, I want to go so far as to say your work is quite a step beyond. You understand empiricism. And because you understand epistemology and you are moving forward, the person who says this is not playing on the same level. So, they actually do not understand anything about epistemology. They are beholden to a very particular conventional 400 year old hardening understanding that I believe is becoming undone. So yeah. I know this argument very well in my own work and to the degree that the editors with me in the journal agree.
We look to try to bring these things together: The empirical, the objective and the subjective. And that's remember I feel. This conversation is really happening. Inside the parameters of the empiricists, what counts as evidence you know who actually would ask that question if they were coming from a constructivist point of view, they they might be asking something different. So I think we have to keep in mind not to be burdened. By the the the rewards, the expectations, the standards of a system that doesn't support our. Work. I mean, here we are just trying to bring more good into. World and somehow we also have to, you know. Have these very difficult conversations about epistemology. So it is difficult and therefore I'm happy to have at least the journal, the Handbooks and the many people. The world. Who? Who are asserting that? Yes, we care about this critique. We try to meet this critique, but we can't only be concerned about their standards.
Guro H. H.:
We're now talking kind of about the research and the epistemology. You said that you work with dialogues with people like we do too. Filo cafe is only one approach amongst many in in philosophical practise, which is our field - our practical field, so to speak, within education. And in this work, in this practical philosophical dialogue work, we often experience that it takes quite a while to get people to move from a cognitivist way of thinking and being into a more existential and phenomenological way of being, and of being in dialogue. And maybe in our experience, I think getting to this more deep, even spiritual, way of being is necessary in order to create transformation. And here I come to the question. In 2022 you published the book Action Research Transformation - Art at the Time of Eco Social Crisis. And the other day, November 2024, you published a piece in the Journal of Management Inquiry on what you call Climate Action, based in an experience you had on a conference regarding the topic “impactful scholarship”. Both are probably indicating what you are concerned about and working on at the moment. So first, what do you mean by impact as opposed to how your colleagues understand impact, that's the first question, and then we come to the transformation.
Hilary B.:
Yeah. I mean a very simple answer would be impact is a tangible improvement in a system, right? And from an environmental or ecological point of view that might be I would point to the work that I did at the the port of Los Angeles, which has a huge impact on bringing carbon dioxide emissions of all the shipping down. So that's tangible. That's what impact means. However, nobody is going to know about that in the Academy unless we also write about it. So, we were a team, some engineers wrote some stuff on the actual carbon calculator, and some port officials brought this work around the world through the conferences. So, it is the action that we did that is tangible, and then it is the research that kind of shares it in a way that other people can do something similar.
Now, when you were talking about phenomenology, I thought you were pointing to, and maybe you are, to something that I think is very difficult for us, which is to bring people into what I would call an experiential kind of knowledge. And action researchers are particularly tasked with this. And it is particularly appreciated, I think, when we bring it to our stakeholders, because often our stakeholders are not academics, so they're not quite so stuck in a cerebral understanding. They do have a lot of practical knowledge, and therefore this reflection on practise that you do, that I do, is really key. And doing it in a way that is good is really very difficult because again we have very little training with it. We are trained not to go below the neck, and so all the information from the hands, from the intuition - all of this information needs to be accessed in a different way, and I mentioned socio-drama as just one example. There are many practises. But part of our work, therefore, is stretching to different types of practises that allow us capture more of experience, because it is experience that gets transformed through reflection that can then be conceptualised, and it is very, very difficult.
Guro H. H.:
Yeah. And maybe you already answered it, but how can action research contribute to impactful transformation in the massive climate crisis that we are facing now?
Hilary B.:
This crisis is huge, and so it's all hands on deck, you know. If we're all on the Titanic, what can each of us do? I can talk about my work, and everybody hopefully is doing their best in their way to address it, and the great diversity of methods. You know, I'm working with an eco-village in Ireland. This is 100 people who have decided to live together - to live differently. I am also working with politicians and policy makers in the Basque region who are doing something similar, so there's different systems of influence. And then, in personal life, I am doing my best to support a local politician. Moreover, I have a little piece of land here, you know, doing regenerative gardening, so hopefully everybody is doing their best. And I think part of the training that we have received - to be passive and to see ourselves as observers – has had the result that many of us don't have confidence. We don't feel hopeful.
We don't have places in which you know - I wish everybody would have a a philosophical cafe available to them. We don't have these things. So people feel lonely. Capitalism brings about loneliness. So we have many problems that need to be solved. And I see action research is one way of helping solve multiple problems, because it also solves loneliness by bringing people into community together. But it is not easy, and presumably everybody that you that you ask might have an answer to, well, what are you doing? We all actually need to be doing something, now, right?
Michael N. W.: You just said that we don't have hope, and in that respect, I would like to mention a recent post on the Action Research Plus Platform called Practises for a Darkening time, in which you address certain questions of spirituality. And in this regard, I would like to ask you, how can you approach spirituality through action research?
Hilary B.:
Yeah. I mean, I'm really just beginning to think about this. It would be nice to think with you. I mean, the first thing is just noticing that there's kind of a taboo around issues of spirituality, again because of this training. I mean, part of the epistemology was to ignore everything that could not be proved, also due to the dominance of the Catholic Church, which was positive in a way, but it then created this split. So you know, during the centuries, if not millennia of philosophy, thinking and knowledge has always had an aspect of the divine - a sense of purpose - a sense of connection. All of that is now thrown out in just maybe the past few decades, where we assert more of an atheistic orientation. And with it, I would say a kind of an epistemological vandalism, because people are left without a sense of purpose, without a sense of connection. So, I give that as background, because talking about spirituality means reinscribing the conversation with things that we feel we have purpose, and my sense of purpose with the world, with ecology, with animals, with feminism, all these things that puts me into connection – which makes me take seriously that I live in a world that's bigger than me. The downside is I can give up hope, because of what needs to be done is so great versus what any one of can do. It's very difficult, but we can bracket that and still come into reflective conversation together. But coming back to Guro's question - you know - coming into experience where we share. And that many of us feel eco anxiety, hopelessness. You know, all these different things are very difficult, and and it requires places of trust. It requires practising, I would say. Reflective practise together over time. I mean, we can start wherever, but if we can manage to be together over time - that's one of the things we do inside the Action Research Foundation. We meet together fairly regularly to come into dialogue.
But yeah, so the simple answer is spirituality is deepening into our own experience of connection, and therefore touching into our deep vulnerability, because so many of these connections are fragile.
Well, I mean, what I want? Do you think you know? Given your work, how does spirituality or maybe we call it sense of connection or purpose? How do you invite people into those kinds of conversations?
Michael N. W.:
Well, I can start with an answer and then Guro can continue because the two of us, together with some colleagues, conducted this little project where we did guided imageries based on the Trilogos method, which is a kind of spiritual practise, so to speak. And the question for us was then, what did these imagery exercises do with us? How did they change us, influence us? Was there an impact on our personal life as well as on our academic life, so to speak? Are there any ideas that came out that inspired our work as researchers? We are just doing an article about that project because there was definitely an impact, so to speak, they were definitely some inspiring ideas, both on a personal level but also on what we do as academics as scholars. So, for me or for us, this would be a form of action research. Not on spirituality, but with a spiritual practise, so to speak.
Hilary B. Oh, beautiful, and using images I get the value of bringing people out of a more cerebral kind of linear language way into a more imaginative intuitive. Yeah, I look forward to reading that paper.
Guro H. H.:
Yeah, it will be published in an anthology called The Humanising Power of Philosophical Practise in Counselling and Education, which is under peer review. Michael and I have worked together since 2018, I think now. But I myself have developed this philosophical dialogue approach which I called Dialogos, starting back in 2004. The word logos is actually a spiritual concept, and you said you are a theologian or that you have a theological background, so you would know the opening words in the gospel of John: “In the beginning was the word”, or “in the beginning was logos”- Logos is Greek for word, or also wisdom: In the beginning was wisdom. So, we work dia-logos when entering into philosophical dialogues over time, which is what I've been working on quite a lot really - entering into a spiritual realm, I would say. I've never actually expressed it this way before, though. One of the articles that I wrote for this book that I mentioned I have named “There is so much love in this room. On Eros, Filia and Agape in Dialogos philosophical dialogues”, where we have this experience of love developing in the relationships between people during the dialogue. Which was quite breathtaking actually. So, both the Trilogos approach and the Dialogos approach are, I would say, spiritual approaches, but they also has the cognitive critical analytical dimension, the existential dimension, the relational commutative dimension, the cultural, historical dimension and the practical ethical dimension, which is also very central to action research, of course.
Hilary B.: That's beautiful. In some ways, you're defining spirituality. It's a difficult thing to define, right, isn't it? But you're giving it this dimensionality and helping people see just you know, how practical - how useful this is. And also a little bit coming out of the closet - using the language of spirituality, which, yeah, I mean it, it can be quite difficult. Because many of us have inherited very domineering forms of religion, really. It is not only spirituality. It is kind of religion. And so there, there is this way that I think we're all trying to figure out how to be secular. Or I think the more correct term is ecumenical, but not just Protestant or Catholic, but just in the liberating traditions all over the world - how important it is to grant the importance of one another's felt understandings. And one thing I have noticed is how our training in religion often sets us up for how we listen, how we deal with things and so, yeah, these dialogic processes that can open up and dig under and see what's moving through. It is a rather intuitive thing that then - you know - touches into the feelings of love or the spiritual, and people can get scared by that. Of course. Right. It is tricky, but it is lovely and it's certainly more interesting than a PowerPoint presentation, you know, because people are more engaged when their body, mind and heart has been touched.
Guro H. H.:
You suggest ecumenical. But I would actually interreligious, like, global almost, because we are human beings in a shared world. We have so much in common across divides. Often we focus on the differences. But to follow up on what we've just said now: In one of your articles you mentioned the word collaborative selflessness, and it seems that this is also touching upon spirituality. Can you say some more about what you mean by collaborative selflessness?
Hilary B.:
Yeah, and I want to bookmark that a way into the spiritual conversation that wouldn't frighten people as much, is to embrace emotion. Like, “what is it I'm feeling?” or the attitude- “what is the tone that I'm sitting with”, and that connects to that piece of work that you're mentioning. So, I was working with physicians, nurses and volunteers in a palliative care context. So that is a context where the patients have decided that they are not going to fight to stay alive, but instead they will be palliated. They will receive medication to reduce pain. And so my work - my offer was to bring a meditation practise that we could each do together and alone. And so in- you know - following the protocol of zen, I think, we had 12 weeks, and so I started it up. I am a meditator myself. I have been for years and then we met once a week. But everybody said they'll do it at least 20 minutes a day. Or maybe we said 10 minutes, because 20 minutes is a lot in the beginning. The people who signed up did that. So, what that paper is actually about comes back to this question of phenomenology, or experience. What it really was about is slowing down the conversation inside our heads when we're sitting with patients, slowing it down enough to begin to notice in the more tangible sense way. What are we sensing? What is happening? And to cut a long story short - what people was noticing a lot of was their anxiety, which in some ways is kind of obvious -you would say - in a palliative care context. But mostly people just overrode anxieties like, “oh, let's just ignore that because we want to be good”. “We want to be good nurses”, “good volunteers”. So the discovery was in noticing the anxiety. It was actually a good thing, because then I can be present to myself. And being present to myself, actually, perhaps ironically, allows me to be more present to the other person. So, in other words, I could become more selfless by actually concentrating on my own senses such that I can collaborate and help the patients better. And after this 12 weeks, there were some beautiful stories of finding courage in the face of anxiety, simply by noticing the truth of my own experience.
Michael N. W.:
In that regard, I would like to post a final question for this episode. We spoke about the spiritual dimension, the existential dimension, also the emotional and ethical dimension. Now with what you just said, and in that respect we can say that the name for this podcast - ResponsAbility - refers to phronesis which can be translated as practical wisdom. And the question to you is where and how does practical wisdom come into the picture in action research, as you see it?
Hilary B.:
I want to actually end by asking you because you're the one doing this podcast. But what immediately comes up for me is the emotion. Is it the emotion? I mean, it is a life force called the will to do something and I think, to know and acknowledge the will. It is not something that we rationally think out, right? But it takes a little courage. Many, many, many people want the world to be different. And yet they are forced to feel kind of passive, so owning our will is probably a little bit like owning our anxiety. And when I really own it, I kind of have to relinquish that I'm going to get the outcomes that I really want. But I can still take some practical steps towards a better future, but it requires me giving up, doesn't it? It's going to look a particular way because I think as action researchers, we must go into dialogue with others -with other system actors - I think it's partly about being - you know - being ourselves strong. But it is being strong together, finding a new way of leading and following with one another. I think it was Aristotle who said that courage is the primary virtue. It is something here about courage. And now, in good action research form, I turned the question on you. What are you learning about phronesis in all these podcasts?
Michael N. W.:
When you started to answer my question, you also said that OK, can you tell me what you mean with ResponsAbility and why you called the podcast like that? And that is quite easy to answer. We already mentioned it in a in another episode with John Hattie a few days ago. And that is actually a book by Viktor Frankel, called Man's Search for Ultimate meaning. And in that book, it's not about the question, “what do you expect from life?”, but it's rather the opposite: “what does life expect from you?” And it is at this point where ResponsAbility comes into account, and you elaborate it now bit on dialogue and what dialogue actually means within action research, and I think it's through this question “what does life expect from me” - or from us, where we are invited to a dialogue with life and this is also where action research plays an important role because you are investigating that question by means of action oriented approach and then it's not only about the question, are you producing scientific knowledge? No, it's rather about what kind of meaning or meanings occur in the process, and me and Guro can continue with that. But for me as a philosopher, the search for meaning is very central, not only for humanity in general, but also within research and academia.
Guro H. H.: Beautiful. I would maybe add that in our work in professional education, the question for us is also practical. You know, how can we enhance people's ResponsAbility? Both their courage, will and ability to act well in concrete situations, and becoming conscious - getting in touch with themselves, becoming selfless, maybe being able to go into a classroom or a hospital or whatever situation people are going to work, and actually be open to the people they meet there and to what life calls us to do in the current moment.
Hilary B.:
I love that. And you're flipping it in a way that I think is important in an epochal kind of way, by asking what does life want from me? It is beautiful! If I think back to will and courage – you are in a way inviting us to see that we don't have to be individually afraid. We can trust that life - this is a big spiritual thing - but we can trust that life is unfolding through us, through nature, through business, through academia, even academia, and if we can just participate with it, then we can trust. I mean, it's obviously going to be a little difficult too, these days. We're coming into collapse, but nonetheless still to be able to respond, to be responsible. I love that and I feel, I feel in my heart, enriched by our conversation.
Michael N. W.:
Thank you very much, and I think this is a beautiful final word. And with that, I would like to say thank you very much, Hillary, for being our guest today. I would also like to thank our listeners. I hope that they are joining us again in some other episodes too and. With that, Guro and I can only say thank you and goodbye!