Royal Road to ART

Royal Roads U. campus sits within a beautiful forest and beside a lagoon, on the territory of Xwsepsum and Lekwungen families.
Royal Roads U. campus sits within a beautiful forest and beside a lagoon, on the territory of Xwsepsum and Lekwungen families.

The progressive School of Leadership Studies at Royal Roads University in Canada invited Hilary Bradbury to be a Visiting Professor throughout 2020.  A relatively youthful university,  RRU has emphasized its commitment to action oriented education and research since its founding. The campus is lovely, situated on the territory of the Xosapsum and LKwungen families on Vancouver Island. 

In video clip you see Dr. Catherine Etmanski sharing examples of MA Leadership students’ engaged and action-oriented approaches to research. She also speaks of her involvement in the AR+ community as a co-facilitator with Hilary for the “Mindful Integration of Creativity and Action” (MICA) co-lab.

Dr. Hilary Bradbury then describes and illustrates  the Action Research for Transformations initiative, and the multiple possibilities for collaboration as part of the AR+ global community and beyond. She’s asking What is the developmental edge of engaged, action-oriented work? What might Action oriented Research for Transformations look like in your context?

Dr. Niels Agger-Gupta speaks about his involvement in the “Action Research for Transformations” community since the first AR+ global gathering  in Sweden in 2019, where he shared his expert practice with large group collaborative research processes, especially World Cafe.

This conversation is part of how AR+ Foundation convenes community, curates resources, and develops accessible resources emphasizing Action Research for Transformations (ART). AR+ is calling action researchers to better tie their efforts, practice, and inquiry to the challenging practice which:
·       Supports collective thriving on this planet.
·       Includes and transcends individualistic rationalist empiricism.
·       Starts with stakeholders’ felt experiences and a joint willingness to tackle unilaterally held power that divides us.
·       Embraces multiple ways of knowing-for-action, with concern for tending “brave spaces” to enable transformative capacity.
·       Integrates personal/reflexive (“first person-“), interpersonal/relational (“second person-“) and impersonal (“third person-“) knowledge; because all three are needed to empower us to shape the social world of our aspirations.

The link to the presentation is here: https://youtu.be/w2Dvbre9W6E

More background reading on ART: Hilary Bradbury, Steve Waddell, Karen O’ Brien, Marina Apgar, Ben Teehankee, Ioan Fazey.  (2019). A call to Action Research for Transformations: The times demand it. Action Research Journal, 17(1) 3-10.