Last year I became a Taos Associate, an organisation that consists of practitioners and academics who apply a social constructionist and appreciative inquiry lens to their work as well as their philosophy. Here is a cut and paste from Taos’s website:
The Taos Institute is a community of scholars and practitioners concerned with the social processes essential for the construction of reason, knowledge, and human value.
We are a non-profit organization committed to exploring, developing and disseminating ideas and practices that promote creative, appreciative and collaborative processes in families, communities and organizations around the world.
We achieve our educational ends through conferences, workshops, publications, a PhD program, a distance learning program, newsletters, and web-based offerings. We work at the interface between the scholarly community and societal practitioners from communities of mental health, social work, counseling, organizational change, education, community building, gerontology and medicine. We develop and explore the ways in which scholarly research can enrich professional practices, and practices can stimulate scholarly inquiry.
The website is a tremendous source of information for anyone interested in collaborative practice, social constructionism and appreciative inquiry just to mention a few. I encourage artists to go into the site and read work on collaborative practice. Ken and Mary Gergen have also recently written a book on creativity (still being published). Keep an eye on the site to learn more.