This beautiful volume offers a range of research possibilities for practitioners. Bringing together the work of a community of scholars whose work blurs the edges between the arts and social sciences in the name of practice-based inquiry, Creative Practitioner Inquiry in the Helping Professions offers engaging and accessible exemplars alongside clear explanations of the theoretical understandings and backgrounds to the approaches offered. The book's contributors are teachers, doctors, social workers, counsellors, psychotherapists, health and community workers and organisational consultants; together they passionately engage in arts-based research as an effective and accessible instrument of inquiry, knowledge dissemination and social change.

This beautiful volume offers a range of research possibilities for practitioners. Bringing together the work of a community of scholars whose work blurs the edges between the arts and social sciences in the name of practice-based inquiry, Creative Practitioner Inquiry in the Helping Professions offers engaging and accessible exemplars alongside clear explanations of the theoretical understandings and backgrounds to the approaches offered. The book’s contributors are teachers, doctors, social workers, counsellors, psychotherapists, health and community workers and organisational consultants; together they passionately engage in arts-based research as an effective and accessible instrument of inquiry, knowledge dissemination and social change.

Acknowledgements; About the Contributors; Prologue: How and Why This Book Was Written; 1. Introduction to ‘Creative Practitioner Inquiry in the Helping Professions’; Part One: Visual Inquiry; 2. Introduction to Visual Inquiry; 3. Seeing Learning Disability: A Re/claimed Book; 4. From a Different Perspective: Interrogating Nursing Through Art; 5. Sailing and the Dad Connection; 6. Dzo Dancing; Part Two: Written Inquiry; 7. Introduction to Written Inquiry; 8. A Life of My Story; 9. Battered Fish out of Water: A Work in Progress; 10. Cocka Rogie’s Song: Outsiders Within; 11. Sisters, Secrets and Silence; 12. New Scripts for Old Women; 13. Visible Women: Tales of Age, Gender and In/visibility … Poetic Representation Reveals; 14. Writing Back to Life; Part Three: Collaborative Inquiry; 15. Introducing Collaborative Ways of Working; 16. Conversation with Sylvia in Colour; 17. Two Men Talking: Performing Selves in Emergent Relational Space; 18. Bare Arsed Stories; 19. Encountering ‘Gerald’: Experiments with Meandering Methodologies and Experiences Beyond Our ‘Selves’ in a Collaborative Writing Group; 20. Epilogue.