From family education to family learning: what happens when professionals become researchers

This paper reflects on a cooperative inquiry with professionals who work with families at risk. The research stemmed from shared recognition of the systemic and complex nature of families: learning in families is interdependent, inter-connected, lifelong and lifewide, internally shaped by morphogenetic and homeostatic trends, and externally shaped by constraints and resources from the larger system. Complexity also means that any observer of the family brings her story and epistemology into the process of inquiry. Professionals became researchers not only by observing and collecting stories and other data, but in discussing how stories are co-constructed, personal, and related to other stories (in agencies and in society). This way of doing research, outside the academy brings researchers to recognize and celebrate the complexity of the researched, composing different levels and ways of knowing: from experience, through aesthetic and narrative representations, they develop useful theories that bring to deliberate and ecological action.