Pausing in the pandemic: Using a co-inquiry approach to advance relational and reflective learning in a university-community partnership

Introduction

This article demonstrates a reflective and collective inquiry process among eight stakeholders of a multi-year partnership between a university social innovation center and a youth play non-profit. This inquiry began six months after the World Health Organization’s declaration of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on March 11, 2020. Organizations in all sectors were scrambling to adapt offerings to a socially distant reality and urgent deprivations in their communities. As calls for innovative programming pivots circulated higher education networks, we embraced this moment to conduct what we call “co-inquiry” by (1) pausing a nascent participatory action research (PAR) project for more intentional and open-ended reflection, (2) experimenting with cooperative inquiry (CI) and collaborative developmental action inquiry (CDAI) methodologies, and (3) co-writing about our experiences recalibrating an existing partnership around mutual power. Within the context of a public health crisis, we asked how pausing for reflection and recalibration could advance a long-term University-Community partnership at a moment in which academic notions of “productivity” and “action research” were not feasible. Co-inquiry and co-writing as a process generated knowledge not just about this partnership and project, but about the necessary role of reflection in building and maintaining mutuality in University-Community partnerships more broadly.

Both action research and community engagement literatures stress the need to make research partnerships more participatory (Bradbury, 2022; Lepore et al., 2022). Such practices enhance collaborator benefit and autonomy and enrich knowledge about social practice through multiple perspectives (Erfan & Torbert, 2015; Jagosh et al., 2012; Reason & Heron, 1995). However, research collaborations often struggle with best practices for equitable University-Community partnerships. Academic priorities – such as an extant research agenda, rigid semester timelines, or student learning requirements – often shape partner choices and project directions and discourage adaptation to community needs (Koekkoek et al., 2021; Stoecker, 2008; Stoecker & Tyron, 2009). Stakeholders’ conflicting assumptions about ownership and capacity can also hinder projects (Bortolin, 2011; Cherrington et al., 2018; Dempsey, 2010). Even well-intentioned partnerships fall into the “paradox of participation” when academics subvert mutual engagement by forcing participatory action research on partners (Arieli et al., 2009, p. 264). Given these challenges, many partnerships feature community consultation rather than shared ownership (CTSA, 2011; Gaffikin & Morrissey, 2008; Miller & Hafner, 2008; Weerts & Sandmann, 2008). Many action-oriented scholars have turned to reflection to disrupt these unilateral power dynamics (Braithwaite et al., 2007; Cherrington et al., 2018; Latta et al., 2018). A key feature of reflections is inward examination of how situated social identities and relations shape collaborations. Beginning with personal transformation is necessary for action researchers seeking community transformation (Glenzer & Divecha, 2020). However, few reflections show how existing partnerships align around mutuality mid-stream.

Therefore, this paper illustrates procedures and insights from co-inquiry that helped us reattune to the power-sharing aspirations of our PAR project. We show how we turned disruption into an opportunity for personal transformation and interpersonal alignment. We intentionally “paused” to explore “developmental and relational orientations” of action research that offer many pathways to knowing about ourselves in service of social transformation (Bradbury et al., 2019, p. 5). Bradbury (2022) suggests that “pausing” to attend to our own experiences in silence can help action researchers reframe ideas and discover new possibilities. The CDAI progressive loop-learning framework aided reframing by generating feedback about past project failures, our current process, and partnership dynamics we want in the future (Torbert, 1999). Single-loop learning entails adjusting tactics to achieve a better outcome, while double-loop learning requires surfacing assumptions so that our strategies become more malleable in present and future reflections (Argyris & Schon, 1978). From there we progressed to triple-loop learning, a polysemous concept that can imply learning about our learning, revealing deeper purposes, or in-the-moment recalibration of values (Tosey et al., 2011). We sought to build our capacities for “mutually transforming power” and “timely action” by integrating multiple levels of awareness about interconnections and options for the “most effective and appropriate interaction in the present situation” (Erfan & Torbert, 2015, p. 65). The public health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the importance of “timely action.” Further, the disaster context illuminated the ways in which we were not achieving the mutuality required of a PAR project.

Practical and political considerations informed our choice of co-authoring our insights. Writing together asynchronously and remotely felt like a feasible way to connect during a pandemic. Positioning non-academic stakeholders as “co-authors” also challenged academic dominance over knowledge production. Marginalized milieus are too often excluded from owning knowledge created about them (Koekkoek et al., 2021; Lepore et al., 2022). Co-authorship also showcases the participatory epistemologies of CI which see a “world not of separate things but of relationships which we co-author”, elevating our embodied expertise about partnering and collapsing boundaries between “knower” and “known” (Reason & Heron, 1995, p. 122). Mindful of the unique contribution first- and second-person voices can make to social research (Erfan & Torbert, 2015; Kjellström & Mitchell, 2019), this paper centers our single-, double-, and triple-loop insights as valid knowledge about University-Community engagement and action research. We conclude with lessons learned for conducting co-inquiry in existing partnerships.

Methodology

Single-loop learning: Recognizing barriers to engagement

Single-loop learning around why we failed to enact the PAR project pointed to pandemic conditions that exacerbated historical disparities among stakeholders. Many journal entries recounted struggling to adjust to new realities in spring of 2020. However, reviewing side-by-side journals revealed vastly different struggles due to our identities and corresponding privileges and exclusions.

PlayBuild Community Board Member Author 4’s Journal

These entries illustrate inequity vis-a-vis different threats. Community Board members were more severely threatened by the coronavirus’s spread than other authors. By June of 2020, Black residents accounted for 77 % of COVID-19 deaths despite being only 60 % of the Orleans Parish population (Weinstein & Plyer, 2020). These figures underscore persistent exclusion of low-income communities of color from high-quality healthcare, housing, food, and working conditions; they were more likely in public-facing service jobs rather than white-collar remote-based roles. While Author 2 and University-based authors experienced no drastic disruptions to their income, Author 4 lost her main source of employment and struggled with feelings of purposelessness.

Disparities in technological and risk management resources were also evident. The University’s abilities to provide technological support, build temporary structures, and implement rigorous infection monitoring allowed members to swiftly move online in March and resume in-person activities in the fall. Even as University students resumed onsite service-learning, PlayBuild could not reinstate in-person programming for their audience. Nor could Board members bridge the “digital divide” to join remote programs or operations. These conditions reduced opportunities for Community Board members and the organization’s network of neighborhood children to engage in PlayBuild and Center activities.

Despite espoused commitments to power-sharing, Authors 1, 2, and 7 made unilateral decisions about the PAR project. Author 1’s journal below shows her questioning the benefit of pursuing a capacity-building project that did not address the PlayBuild network’s increasing disconnection, economic precarity, and health risks. Engaging the Community Board felt difficult and transactional. Combined with increasingly strict University restrictions on external payments, the inability to connect with Board members also held up efforts to disperse project funds.

Center Project Lead Author 1’s Journal

Even in co-inquiry, Community Board members still faced barriers to interaction. Lacking workable laptops, they used the Zoom app on smartphones; frequent disruptions to cellular connection made the conversation disjointed. Some authors were therefore more able to provide input or direct agendas on this project. While a disaster context heightened these effects, such unbalanced engagement is typical. Greater access to resources enables university stakeholders to take the lead on projects (Miller & Hafner, 2008).

Double-loop learning: Reframing our models of engagement

Co-inquiry progressed into double-loop feedback as we responded to co-authors’ observations and dove deeper into how we conceptualize and enact collaboration. Revisiting the origins of the PAR project from each other’s perspectives surfaced the fragility in its foundations, rendering visible intra- and inter-organizational power dynamics. ²

Center Research Fellow Author 6’s Journal

Co-authors’ differences were discursive as well as material. Reading Author 3’s entry opened up dialogue about how authors framed concepts like “design” and “community” differently in project aspirations. While Author 1 envisioned sharing a design thinking toolkit for creative problem-solving, Author 3 framed the project as co-design of shared agendas. Her “outsider” vision of a more empowering approach suggested that the PAR project was not set up to foster mutual power as intended. These accounts also reveal the negotiation of ownership among a diverse and revolving cast, informed by race and institutional location. Author 3 also called us to better define “community” and their needs endogenously. A subsequent discussion focused on Board members’ framings of “community” as a geographically-bounded collective and raised uncomfortable queries into alignment between their goals and PlayBuild leadership. Author 4 and 5’s aspirations center around organizing to address violence and deprivations at the neighborhood level rather than PlayBuild’s strategy of delivering programming for youth.

Conversation with Community Board Authors 4 and 5 and Center Research Assistant Author 8

University co-authors and Author 2 were keen to connect interpersonal misalignments to an institutional analysis. Their reflections problematized University actors’ outsized role in collaborations alongside academia’s legitimacy and planning practices. We noted how small organizations like PlayBuild operate in shifting conditions yet must cater to academic timelines. These factors feed into unequal partnerships and complicate abilities to meet community needs, especially during a disaster. Neither organization was positioned to respond to pandemic-specific challenges despite long-term partnership strategies. Rigid university bureaucracies and PlayBuild’s limited resources precluded shifting timelines, budgets, and roles towards emergency response. We were sensitive to the heroic narrative of the University’s response to Hurricane Katrina when it rebranded around “civic engagement” in the form of service-learning and community-engaged research. Author 6’s acknowledgement of these legacies led us to question how to identify and subvert hegemonic structures in our practices.

However, University authors desired mutual inquiry that centered community-based perspectives. When Community Board authors demonstrated little interest in responding to this institutional analysis, it was time to move on to new topics.

Triple-loop learning: Seeing opportunities to hold space

Our co-inquiry process progressed into triple-loop learning after we saw the misalignments that surfaced in our differing understandings of the partnership, and we came to realize that “pausing” was, in fact, timely action. At the time of the co-authorship of this paper, the PAR project and PlayBuild’s neighborhood programming remained paused. Sitting with feelings of ambiguity and inaction was deeply uncomfortable; all authors’ reflections conveyed uncertainty: “I’m not sure what we’re doing or what I’m supposed to be doing.” However, the downshift in project work created opportunities for triple-loop learning. Grounding in the relational values of CI and CDAI taught us to trust that answers can come from co-inquiry, pausing, and holding space.

Insights emerged as we unpacked the complex “mess” of our interactions and encountered others’ unique perspectives. One of our key understandings builds on a double-loop learning thread connecting our identities to framings of situations, and we began to see our positionalities as asset. A conversation among Authors 1, 2, and 3 below illustrates how research cycling led to the discovery that co-inquiry makes room for new perspectives to enter existing schemas in the partnership.

Triple-loop feedback allowed authors to play with new framings of partnership. Author 3 and Author 7’s comments on paper drafts offered a new container for learning, and others latched on this notion of “holding space” as a necessary ingredient for collaboration. “Space” meant many things: being present to see what emerges; prioritizing relationship-building alongside goal-oriented work; connecting and listening without an agenda; and, accepting our inabilities to respond to every situation. It helped us reframe “pausing” from “doing nothing” to “timely action”.

Through co-inquiry, we moved collectively towards prioritizing relationship-building. Summing up the conclusions of this paper, Author 4 noted, “you have to communicate with people first.” These sentiments echo Lillie et al.’s (2020) book, The Relationship Is The Project: Working with Communities. A final conversation with Center and Community Board authors models holding space for connecting. Using rounds of solo reflection and sharing, we asked each other three questions:

• What’s the partnership you really want? To encourage intention-setting and dreaming of alternative arrangements while highlighting perspectives not normally centered.

Community board members Authors 4 and 5 organically described the need for pausing in relational space in the work that PlayBuild was conducting with community youth. At various levels of this long-term University-Community partnership, we found that recalibration and reflection was necessary, especially in difficult circumstances, such as disaster contexts. It was only in the context of our pause that we came to these relationally developed insights for better University-Community engagement practices going forward.

Discussion

Our main goal with co-inquiry was to explore whether “pausing” a formal University-Community research project for reflective and relational learning was an ethical response to the disaster context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The co-inquiry process produced valuable insights for our writing team about our practices of collaboration and inquiry in a University-Community partnership, especially at a moment of crisis. These auto-ethnographic observations support a growing body of knowledge about how power in such relationships tends to skew towards university actors (Koekkoek et al., 2021; Stoecker, 2008; Stoecker & Tyron, 2009). While there are plenty of best practices for critical University-Community collaboration to counter these tendencies, we add to this body of knowledge through experimental and embodied learning. Our experiences suggest that co-inquiry can offer an antidote to some of these unilateral patterns of engagement. Our lessons-learned about structuring multi-modal reflection processes offer a guide for conducting co-inquiry in ongoing University-Community partnerships.

Engaging in progressive cycles of loop learning facilitated transformation around mutual power. This process began with the discovery that the disaster context exacerbated pre-existing disparities in power and resources among members of the partnership. Single-loop examination uncovered common saboteurs of mutual engagement, including academic bureaucracies and material inequities at individual and organizational levels (Dempsey, 2010; Koekkoek et al., 2021; Stoecker, 2008). Yet deeper, double-loop reflection revealed the interpersonal misalignments in project framings and engagement strategies that already plagued the partnership and hampered our PAR project, suggesting that we were not all ready to embody the power-sharing aspirations of PAR (Noel, 2016). We found that while the pandemic presented unique barriers to collaboration, our partnership’s touchpoints had long neglected relationship-building and agenda-setting (both critical elements of PAR), and therefore, reflected foundational power disparities and framing misalignments. Moving into triple-loop feedback opened up reflexive lines of inquiry about how we wanted to partner. It created opportunities to practice new modes of mutual, emergent learning. Interpersonal reflection allowed for realignment around new perspectives in the relationship.

Thus, we found that “pausing” for reflection and recalibration became a driver of learning and knowledge production in our partnership. This notion runs directly counter to higher education’s institutional structures and cultures, which thrive on advanced planning and traditional measures of productivity. We noted how faculty authors struggled with unpredictability while operating within these bureaucratic structures and emergency situations. Grounding in the relational values of pausing taught us that it is okay to not know the right move and to trust that answers are more likely to emerge through co-inquiry. This insight suggests that action researchers can also apply Bradbury’s (2022) individual practice of “pausing” to holding interpersonal space for relationship-building and frame-creation. Taking time to recalibrate complex relationships as people and conditions change can be a “timely action” amidst uncertainty (Amey et al., 2002; Arieli et al., 2009; Cherrington et al., 2018). In our desire to build capacity for “timely action”, we discovered that sometimes the absence of conventional action (marked by university-centric outputs) is a timely response. “Pausing” one project created space to experiment with new modes of co-learning and reframe our approaches to partnership. Our conversation demonstrates how reflection and reframing facilitated by pausing allow new perspectives to enter existing partnerships. This insight adds depth to community engagement best practices of “authentic relationships,” which requires significant time investment (Miller & Hafner, 2008; Maurrasse, 2001). Our process suggests that even long-term partnerships benefit from frequent recalibration, indicating that time for reflective and relational learning should be structured into ongoing collaborations.

This suggests that co-writing can be an important means of facilitating co-inquiry. However, we do also have reservations about co-writing as a medium for facilitating and enacting this pause, especially on such an institutionally, socio-economically, and racially diverse team. Collective reflection was a powerful mechanism for surfacing misalignments practicing new ways of relating. Using first- and second-person voice in our reflections, usually eschewed in academic manuscripts, brought reflexivity to the forefront (Kjellström & Mitchell, 2019). The act of reading common texts – whether meeting minutes or personal journals – created a “perceptual anchor...to literally see ourselves in action” (Arieli et al., 2009, p. 287). We suggest that sharing written accounts can help action researchers analyze their own role in projects and submit their positions to feedback. However, a crucial learning for us was that people “write” differently: voice-notes, conversations, and other creative forms can count. Furthermore, we recommend attending more to somatic sensing and non-verbal aspects of Bradbury’s (2022) “pausing” method than we did by incorporating meditation, body scans, drawing, and movement as reflection modalities. We suggest liberating structures – facilitation tools to unleash group creativity and ownership – for discrete interactions (Lipmanowicz & McCandless, 2013). Easy methods, like 1-2-4-all for scaffolding individual and group discussion and drawing together to visualize latent thoughts, could balance voices and guide attention. AI transcription services and mobile phone audio-visual recording make it increasingly easier to capture non-written expressions. Featuring reflections in write-ups maintains the integrity of diverse perspectives in a collective process.

We also note that “pausing” for relational and transformative learning can feed into a common critique of action research: lingering in inquiry rather than creating new actionable plans (Romme & Georges, 2004). Like some CI practitioners, we eschewed rigid phases to allow for emergent directions in both scope and method (Reason & Heron, 1995). We refrained from using design thinking tools like problem-solving sprints or prototyping methods to prevent rushed reflection and quick fixes. However, our process was too loose and we did not get to action-planning within the co-writing timeframe. Glenzer and Divecha (2020) recommend faster learning loops, seen in corporate tools like agile project management, to enhance impact and match the pace at which communities can learn. Shorter observation-synthesis-experimentation cycles could help co-inquirers crystallize insights more quickly and rigorously.

Care should be taken, however, to avoid stumbling into the “participatory paradox” as we did, at times, in the processes of writing this paper (Arieli et al., 2009). Co-writing for the purposes of academic publishing created limitations to participation, particularly for Community Board co-authors. Rushing to meet journal deadlines limited our timeframe for reflections, and they could not respond as quickly to journals or drafts. These dynamics, plus academic authors’ desires to redress University hegemony, skewed the paper towards academic perspectives. Furthermore, while the reflection piece of co-inquiry was useful to all authors, producing an academic paper was not. We recommend several remedies, such as sharing the benefits of peer-reviewed publication at the start to generate buy-in (Flicker & Nixon, 2018) and taking more time for reflection to match all collaborators’ pace. However, confining action research to academic production undermines inclusion (Bradbury, 2022). Therefore, we also recommend exploring different knowledge-sharing formats that community authors can lead, such as: plain-language summaries; bullet-point slide decks; recorded presentations or author interviews; and, visual representations. Our three prompts about interests and contributions in triple-loop learning could initiate conversations about possibilities. More accessible outputs can enhance the value and replicability of inquiry in all settings. We hope that sharing our experience supports action researchers feeling pressured to center productivity measures over relationship-building when collaborating to address social problems.

Conclusion

This essay features a group of women reflecting on our University-Community partnership during a pandemic. When COVID-19 forced us to suspend a PAR project, we pivoted to co-inquiry about our partnership dynamics. Our process involved an intentional pause for experimenting with cooperative inquiry and collaborative developmental action inquiry through co-authorship. Our progressive process opened increasingly reflexive and exploratory lines of inquiry, leading to personal transformations and broader insights about community engagement and action research. Single-loop examination of the past uncovered common culprits of Community-University partnerships gone awry. The pandemic exacerbated pre-existing disparities in societal and organizational access to resources, preventing mutual engagement in projects. Double-loop learning about the past and present illuminated misalignments among our stances about engagement. As we moved from asking why we failed to execute a design thinking capacity-building project to questioning the work itself, we discovered that we were not all ready to embody the power-sharing practices at the heart of PAR. We started to practice triple-loop learning as we reimagined our learning processes, seeking a way to engage in mutuality, respect plurality and center evolving, often-marginalized community perspectives. This experiment enabled the perspective-taking we needed to reframe situations collaboratively and led to a commitment to “hold space” for dialogue and reflection.