Integral Education: New Directions for Higher Learning

A “Developmental Action Inquiry” Approach To Teaching First-, Second-, and Third-Person Action Research Methods

A “Developmental Action Inquiry” Approach To Teaching First-, Second-, and Third-Person Action Research Methods Erica Steckler and William R. Torbert Introduction In this chapter, we suggest that it is only through action and inquiry processes such as those enacted by Developmental Action Inquiry (DAI) (Torbert, 1976, 1987, 1991; Torbert & Associates, 2004) that education, work, and leisure actually become mutually transforming and thus truly integral. In support of this assertion, the introductory section offers, first, brief descriptions of three integral qualities of DAI not focused on by other developmental approaches (e.g., Kegan, 1994; Wilber 2000). Second, we suggest the sources of these three qualities by summarizing Bill (Torbert)’s career of spiritual, educational, and managerial research, teaching, consulting , and leadership. Then, in the main body of the chapter, we introduce Bill and Erica (Steckler)’s work together as teacher and student in a PhD-level course in Action Research Methods (ARM) and later as increasingly peer-like co-authors of this chapter. We offer a close description of a few events that occurred during the course that reflect how an action inquiry approach can generate individual, group, and organizational learning and transformational development toward integrity and mutuality among participants. The three qualities of integral theorizing, personal practice, and educational organizing essential to the praxis of DAI are: 1. Playful first-person efforts to expand and deepen one’s attention to encompass four “territories of experience” simultaneously (Torbert, 1972) and to establish alignment or integrity among them. These four territories constitute the full aesthetic continuum of the attention: 105 106 Erica Steckler and William R. Torbert our individual apprehension of the outside world, sentience of the living being’s own embodiment and performance, discernment of one’s feeling/interpreting/strategizing, and regardfulness for the dynamic quality and source of attention itself. 2. Leaderly second-person initiatives to create communities of inquiry where the individual members and the community as a whole are guided, not just by single-loop incremental feedback from a hierarchical superior, but also by double-loop transforming feedback (Argyris & Schon, 1974; Argyris, Putnam, & Smith, 1985) and by triple-loop presencing and re-aligning feedback (Senge et al., 2004; Scharmer, 2007) from their peers and from organizational superiors acting in a peer-like fashion. 3. Liberating third-person disciplines (Torbert, 1991) that foster the interweaving in everyday life of first-, second-, and third-person action inquiries. The long-term, fundamental aims of each of these modes of DAI is to increase first-person integrity, second-person mutuality, and third-person transformational sustainability. Although DAI is based not only on the action and inquiry methods just mentioned and elaborated below, but also on developmental theory (McGuire, Palus, & Torbert, 2007), we choose not to mention the specific, sequential developmental action-logics in this chapter, in order to highlight the importance of action practices and research inquiries in generating developmental transformations. The main body of this chapter is about the Action Research Methods (ARM) PhD course and will illustrate in detail how first-, second-, and third-person action and inquiry can interweave to generate single-, double-, and triple-loop feedback that aligns the four territories of experience in real-time to help participants increasingly develop and integrate skills, capacities, and awarenesses as both researchers and leaders. The amalgamation of this intentional, multidimensional individual and shared development can in turn transform the given organization (in this case the PhD course in ARM) beyond a typical “community of practice” (that helps members become more competent in a pre-defined arena, primarily through single-loop feedback) toward a true “community of inquiry” (that helps members develop new capacities and worldviews, as well as new competences, through single-, double-, and triple-loop feedback). In order to give these extremely abstract concepts a little initial embodiment, we begin by briefly tracing the wide variety of organizational settings in which Bill Torbert first learned and later guided significant attempts at integrating learning , productivity, and transformational development in education and business. Starting in early adulthood, Bill’s most significant learning organizations included the first-person research/practices of the Gurdjieff Work (Ouspensky, 1949) (in 107 A “Developmental Action Inquiry” Approach which he participated from 1964—1989), where he studied the interplay among his perceptions of the outside world, his bodily sensations as he acted, and his emotions and thinking, all through cultivating a trans-cognitive attention. At the same time, he engaged...