I was trying to think when the original ideas that eventually led to my dissertation first struck me. My thesis was really based on my friendship the late Past President of B.C. People First, Arnold Bennington. My dissertation was certainly generated by Arnold, who taught me so much, but I worked with an amazing group of folks. They had been gathered to advise me for my thesis, but that research actually happened in Ottawa at this great agency called LiveWorkPlay. My favourite prof, Gloria Filax, helped it along, but my supervisor was actually a community development researcher who had taught a class I liked. I was, at that point, just hungry for more knowledge about how research worked so I had chosen the prof who taught the grounded theory class and he had agreed, and then suddenly decided to leave Athabasca and go off on his own. The fellow who agreed to be my supervisor was amazing - was out painting a riverscape in watercolors, on holiday, when I emailed and jumped right in. I got to work with a woman from the REB there who taught me a lot. It was a culminating experience in the excellent AU Masters of Arts, Integrated Studies program, where I had specialised in education and equity studies. I finally got to do my own research and it was even better than I expected...
I had not expected to do a dissertation or a Doctoral degree, but my friends Norman Kunc and Emma Van der Klift were there for lunch with me when AU cut off my library card and I was grieving and convincible. Throughout my dissertation so many more people ended up being involved than I expected.
It was done through a partnership with the Taos Institute and Vrije Universiteit Brussel - I don't think I would have had the patience to go through the usual channels and it was a great experience, with supervisors from both institutions, and lots of editors for the parts of the dissertation that were published. I got to learn so much about social constructionist practices and particularly that lens on research... it was perfect. My Brussels contact was working in rhizomatic narrative theory in Psychology and my USA Taos supervisor was a business leader and consultant.
This was actually one of three books that were going to come out in December 2019 but the other two weren't quite ready and I got tired of trying to push rivers, even though it would have been cool and multi-faceted to put out an academic book, a book of poems and drawings and a book about person centred planning practices, all at the same time. My book is available on amazon here. So glad to see it is stable at #57,819 in books! lol