What's in the "co"? Confronting the challenges of co-creative inquiry in social work education

The topic of this paper is a method labelled "academic co-creative inquiry” developed for use in social work education by Napan (2009) with inspiration from co-operative inquiry. The data stem from a course for final year social work students in New Zealand taught by Napan with another teacher and attended by Phillips as observer. Designed to empower students as co-producers of the course, central aspects of the course content and form are open to negotiation by students across multiple knowledge forms including experiential and indigenous knowledges. At the same time, there are a number of non-negotiables defined by the teacher. Relations between negotiables and non-negotiables will be analysed in terms of tensions between bottom-up and top-down dynamics. Other tensions to be analysed emanate from the wider organisational context which is infused with neoliberal discourse that commodifies education, instrumentalises collaboration in the service of the knowledge economy and stresses individual accountability.